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“... The Founding Fathers of the United States were mainly Southerners: between them, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison can take credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, winning the Revolutionary War, and preserving America’s independence through its turbulent early decades ...”

“... He was trying, sometimes precisely and sometimes with unbelievable slackness, to tell us, like George Meredith in his day, what he knew about ‘modern love’, and to find narrative forms that suited his slippery subject. The point is that the slackness may be as important as the precision; and that there are whole reaches of the novels that are neither ...”

“... after the false, material and murderous revolution ushered in by 1789. Harold Bloom, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man see something profoundly representative in Wordsworth’s sudden retreat from the public to the private sphere – the threshold of modernity, the moment when the political and social goals of history become either unrealisable or ...”

“... history is one of those heartwarming stories of literary virtue rewarded. Her first book, Poor George (1967), generated considerable critical excitement. Desperate Characters (1970) was described as ‘brilliant’ by Alfred Kazin and Irving Howe; Lionel Trilling called it ‘reserved and beautifully realised’. Six years later Karl ...”

“... Here’s his 1970s list: Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather (1 & 2), The Conversation, McCabe and Mrs Miller, California Split, Nashville, Chinatown, The Long Goodbye, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, Carrie, The Fury, The French Connection, The Exorcist, Klute, The Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of ...”

“... Legión Británica played a conspicuous part in several of Bolívar’s battles; it was a Captain George Brown who raised the patriot standard over Spanish lines after Sucre’s victory at Ayacucho in December 1824, the battle that clinched independence. Bolívar liked his British officers: a Union Jack catches the eye in the fresco that adorns the Pantheon ...”

“... born on its outskirts in 1932 – provided the background to her early books. But in the view of George Melly, also from the city, it left her and her prose with something more fundamental: a specific flavour. As a jolly man who loved to sing the blues, Melly, not quoted here, was in a good position to assess a particular Liverpudlian trait: that of ...”

“... real interests? Twenty years ago New Labour thought devolution would reinvigorate Britishness. As George Robertson, one of Blair’s Scottish lieutenants, put it, devolution was meant to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’. It didn’t quite work out like that in Scotland, and south of the border voters proved uninterested in the regional assemblies floated as ...”

“... Southern Reconstruction governments, a national railroad strike, and the annihilation of General George Armstrong Custer and his men by warriors of the Lakota Sioux and other Native American nations (Custer’s Last Stand). Each was seen as a battle in which more primitive people stood in the way of national progress. Increasingly, divisions along the lines ...”

“... Norman Mailer. Is Mailer not, in Vidal’s throwaway line, one of the three Ms, along with Henry Miller and Charles Manson, ‘conditioned to think of women as, at best, breeders of sons, at worst, objects to be poked, humiliated, killed’? (His initial defence, if that is what it was, was to compile the table ‘Number of times married, Number of ...”

“... my reading predictably widened in its range, but it hardly deepened. Joyce, Hardy, Dickens, Camus, George Eliot, Hemingway, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Keats, Byron, Auden, Pound, T.S. Eliot … At 16 I was a chain-reader, on a steady three library books a day when not in school, but my ...”

“... Ponsonby’s contribution and not popular with us at the time. I can’t think of any but J. Miller later remembers ‘At the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the ...”

“... late 18th century, they did so partly by mimicking existing Indian élites. A Nigerian souvenir of George V’s jubilee superimposes their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics ...”

“... the stabs and screeches in Psycho), could pursue some musicological research. Babitz wrote a Daisy Miller-inspired novel, which Heller sent to his publisher: it was turned down. Deciding to be a groupie instead, she raced through the LA art and music scenes. ‘In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz,’ Earl McGrath, later the president of Rolling ...”

“... William Pritchard, Eric Homberger, Michael O’Neill, Rachel Buxton) and the memoirists (Karl Miller, Anthony Thwaite, Robert Conquest), though several of them can lay claim to more than one of these identities. Varied though the essays are in both approach and theme, certain emphases recur. Perhaps the most interesting, urged by several of the ...”