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“... table with her assertiveness – she no longer attends their elaborate Sunday lunches. Nor does Frank, Tony’s smart kid brother, an eight-year-old in Brooklyn, now a successful lawyer. She can talk to Frank more easily than to Tony; they would make a good match but for his being gay. As it is, he’s generous enough not ...”

“... All​ Thayer has is money,’ Sherwood Anderson wrote to Waldo Frank in 1919 about the man who’d just become co-owner and editor of the Dial. Anderson advised Frank to demand a good price for his work: if Thayer ‘does not surrender the money, he is N.G. to anyone’. Scofield Thayer surrendered a lot of money, lavishing it on the artists he admired, and on many he didn’t, including his former friend T ...”

“... more glamorous than most of the actresses in the rest of the issue. ‘A genre is hardening,’ James Wood wrote in his review in the New Republic, and suddenly Smith was the epigone of ‘hysterical realism’, the misbegotten progeny of Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie. When he repeated the charge in the Guardian after the 11 September attacks, she ...”

“... of coin shops and Korean grocers, ice cream parlours, language schools and camera shops. James Smith and Sons’ Umbrellas is the only one people remember. The area has never become obsolete, or not quite – there are shifts with changing tastes – but it has remained undefined: a little shabby, a little trashy, bordered by the genteel to the north ...”

“... by the show’s organisers, Barnaby Wright and Karen Serres, as well as by the painter Merlin James): are these really cooks, waiters and bellboys? Initially this seems to have been the case. The first pastry cook Soutine painted – the subject of the first painting Albert Barnes bought – was tracked down decades later, and identified as the ...”

“... from St Elizabeths in 1958, and then, in 1967, his extensive and fascinating correspondence with James Joyce. But it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the archive floodgates really opened. These decades saw the appearance of volumes individually devoted to Pound’s letters not only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford Madox ...”

“... Randall Jarrell’s possible suicide, Bill’s own depression. And I talked to him about William James’s own breakdown and his resuscitation through faith. What in hell am I doing with all these theatre types? Alfred Kazin’s journals, 26 December 1986 Discount Kazin’s weary, load-bearing sigh in this characteristic entry from his journals, which ...”

“... to Newton’s achievement in his personality. Far and away the best psychohistorian of Newton is Frank Manuel. His Portrait was first published in the USA in 1968, and is here reproduced without alteration: even a howler on page 112 stands uncorrected. Manuel has published two other more specialised books on Newton, but this is his best all-round ...”

“... when the crowd turned against him.  Later, to a packed meeting of the parliamentary party. Frank Dobson was first up. ‘Be warned,’ he said, ‘the Lib Dems and the Tories have not abandoned party politics.’ There was, he alleged, a three-part strategy. When they had disposed of the Speaker, they would demand Gordon’s resignation. If they got ...”

“... in their exotic spear-waving poses. It was some relief to see the paperback of James Fox’s excellent White Mischief with its measured exposure of the shallow callous daftness of settler society circa 1940, popping cheekily up among them. Nairobi is still Africa’s safari capital, where the lucky tourist is offered all kinds of trips to ...”

“... winter of discontent. Still, it was a much better piece than was generally allowed (Clive James and Richard Ingrams making particular fools of themselves) but it wasn’t what viewers had come to expect from me and so was unfamiliar, or too unfamiliar anyway, a little unfamiliarity often an ingredient of success at any rate with critics, as it enables ...”

“... Not that external regulation has worked either. Recent disclosures, including John Yates’s frank admission that his failure to reopen the hacking investigation in 2009 was ‘pretty crap’, suggest that police action against reporters’ malfeasance is as hopeless as the PCC’s. As Stewart Tendler, a Times crime reporter, put it, apparently without ...”

“... looking for a rival almost in his exact class, you’d have to mention George Jacobs, valet to Frank Sinatra, who made his name, and unmade Frank’s to a small degree, by detailing his boss’s general dexterity when it came to smashing up a hotel room. Another rival would be Ernest A. Forssgren, Proust’s Swedish ...”

“... architects on this West Coast gravy train are, predictably, those consummate exterior decorators Frank Gehry and Thomas Heatherwick. They are unlikely to cede control to the rodents inhabiting their bespoke boxes which plainly derive from the biospheres and domes of the late 1960s and 1970s. Those are among the more feasible, more tested, hence more ...”

“... in another writer – one fouled cosmos gently twinned with another – is here turned into a frank split-screen narrative: the two stories almost run alongside each other and the narrative is briefly turned over to the fish, from whose sunken perspective we sense family events. ‘A few times the downstairs door slammed hard enough to jolt him awake. Or ...”