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“... now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers’ etc etc. These are probably Major’s most famous words; no matter that Orwell lurks behind them, gagging on his ploughman’s lunch. Their melancholia, though perhaps not their complaceny, is well suited to ...”

“... is more to her than that. Her mother is the novelist Shena Mackay; her father was the art critic David Sylvester, though she thought of him as an ‘uncle’ until she was 21. She took life drawing classes at Morley College in the late 1980s, which brought her to the attention of Maggi Hambling. A garage belonging to Hambling served as her studio as she ...”

“... part of the province’s culture. The first night, I sit up with the film’s director, David Hammond, adding bits to the script. We’re in the sunroom, as he calls it – a big glass-domed upstairs sitting-room at the back of his house. Purple summer dark, stars, streetlights climbing Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at ...”

“... stanza of Mangan’s: O, my Dark Rosaleen, Do not sigh, do not weep! The priests are on the ocean green, They march along the Deep. There’s wine from the royal Pope, Upon the ocean green; And Spanish ale shall give you hope, My Dark Rosaleen! My own Rosaleen! Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope, Shall give you ...”

“... audio-visual life, but the relatively recent personifications by Albert Finney, Peter Ustinov and David Suchet dominate most memories. None of these figures much resembles the ‘short, stout, elderly man, his hair cut en brosse’ that Agatha Christie describes. Well, they often manage the stout bit, but for the rest they are tallish, more like ...”

“... by homicidal maniacs on a collision course are also coming closer to one another. The novelist David Lodge, in one of the earnest but flustered contributions typical of Authors take sides on the Falklands, is more realistic. He writes that regaining the Falklands is not worth one human life. But he then confesses: ‘There is no doubt in my mind that ...”

“... he slid across the floor of a Paris apartment to swoon at scriptwriters Betty Comden and Adolf Green: ‘You wrote Singin’ in the Rain – my favourite movie!’ Or that it is why Godard intended Une Femme est une femme with its bright colours and reasonless singing as a tribute to Kelly. And why their friend Jacques Demy topped it all by actually ...”

“... Glyn Hughes’s novel, Where I Used to Play on the Green, won both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the David Higham Fiction Prize in 1982, yet it received not a tenth of the publicity awarded to winners of the Booker and the Whitbread. This is a pity, for it is a fine achievement, although too dour a story to command affection in the media ...”

“... and unfit houses’ in Manchester, 15,000 in Oldham, 5000 in Rochdale and 80,000 in Liverpool. David Kynaston cites these figures in his new book, On the Cusp: Days of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition ...”

“... Bernhard (1931-89) is marked by deaths: those of his majoritarian and minoritarian translators David McLintock and Ewald Osers, in 2003 and 2011 respectively; and in 2015 that of Carol Brown Janeway, his publisher at Knopf, his unlikely champion over decades (because, for all his influence and cultishness, Bernhard in English never exactly sold), and the ...”

“... She suddenly saw the possibilities afforded by imaginative use of bright colour. Shadows could be green or blue; highlights orange or yellow or pink. In a painting of Duncan Grant in front of mirror, from 1915, the blue and turquoise of the scarf on his head trickle down to illuminate his hair and the back of the chair. The brushstrokes, especially in the top ...”

“... a triumph – an acquaintance is cited here as drawling that her ‘ability’ to live in Palmers Green while moving in London literary circles was ‘the most compelling thing about her’. First-named throughout this book, by biographers who apparently never met her, Stevie Smith and her work are draped in Palmers Greenery. Would a biographer of Hughes call ...”

“... for back-up, Tensing pulls in behind DuBose, who has stopped his car on Rice St, a pleasant green road outside the university campus. Tensing walks to the car, and the men have a seemingly amiable conversation. The officer is insistent but polite, DuBose vague and indistinct (at one point, he hands over a small bottle of gin). Tensing, addressing DuBose ...”

“... and carbon footprint, caused in part by construction for Olympic venues, was at odds with its green ambitions.In 2013, Thomas Bach – a German fencer, lawyer and sports bureaucrat – was elected the IOC’s ninth president. It has been his task to try to resolve the mounting problems faced by the organisation. It would be useful to have an account of ...”

“... the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) and West Ham, under the majority ownership of David Gold and David Sullivan, two businessmen who had made their money from pornography, agreed that the club would acquire a 99-year lease on the Olympic stadium. By then, West Ham had gone too far to retreat – not least in ...”