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“... that kind of children’s book that can be read and reread by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation.’ This time the complimentary comparison was with The Wind in the Willows. Children will be enchanted, but educated adult readers will appreciate the novel’s depths: ‘To the trained eye, some characters will seem ...”

“... about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ‘quite a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor ...”

“... children … to which she replied that it had been custom-made for Jimmy Clitheroe, the diminutive star of radio and television during the 1960s. She and her husband had helped clear the contents of his mother’s house after they had both died. (He had lived with her and had died from an accidental overdose of sleeping pills on the day of her funeral.) I ...”

“... recur throughout her life. At Wallington County School for Girls the teenage Boty was an instant star. Her younger contemporary, the designer Stella Penrose, remembers her acting in The School for Scandal. ‘She just oozed sexuality … she burst out of her body … It was marvellous. But also shocking.’ In 1954 Boty left to go to Wimbledon School of Art ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... the Rolling Stones who summoned Dionysus and Pan, with their none hipper retinue: Kenneth Anger, Christopher Gibbs, Gram Parsons, Jean-Luc Godard. The Beatles grew sheepdog hair and Bakunin beards, and adopted the statutory exotic guru, but they never really had anything like the Stones’ sullen, dandified grandeur. The Stones were exquisites; the Beatles ...”

“... him. Pupils of Leavis – I’d been one of them myself – spoke of a sinister influence, and a star of the Movement persuasion and of Leavis’s despised London literary world told me, in Fleet Street, that Frank combined the faults of the academic and of the journalist. Frank was not usually inclined – not entitled, perhaps – to agree with the ...”

“... Audens together in the mind, somehow joining in a single conception the charisma of the early star, with all his sudden and surprising brilliance, and the ruminative, bookish, self-deprecating urbanity of the older man. By his own criteria, this made Auden a ‘major poet’, that is, one who ‘writes differently in youth, in middle age and when ...”

“... offered to the world. In those glory years Prince was, alongside Madonna, the most fascinating pop star alive. A black R’n’B artist who juggled shiny white pop signifiers; a self-amused imp who had us follow his playfully dense personal mythology from work to work, never knowing what we might find next time round, in what form he would return, sometimes ...”

“... the recent emergence of bright, youngish MPs, amongst whom Gordon Brown is by no means the only star, effective Scottish contributions from the Labour Front Bench have been tiny relative to the number of seats which Scotland has delivered to the Party over the years. It is true that John Wheatley, of Housing Act fame, was the only creative minister of the ...”

“... Vega Gupta’s​ wedding was a four-day, three-million dollar extravaganza held at a five-star hotel in Sun City, South Africa, in May 2013. Two hundred guests arrived from New Delhi on a chartered Airbus that was allowed to land at a nearby military airbase. Vega’s uncle Atul Gupta met the guests, who were taken to the resort without any passport or visa checks ...”

“... at the end of the three-day Irish Episcopal Conference last March, by the bishop of Elphin, Christopher Jones, a member of the Bishops’ Liaison Committee for Child Protection, who accused the media of being ‘unfair and unjust’: ‘Could I just say with all this emphasis on cover-up, the cover-up has gone on for centuries, not just in the Church ...”

“... detached researchers and editors. Other leading figures also do both, including, in this country, Christopher Ricks and John Carey. But most critics in good repute don’t seem to want to edit, and wouldn’t be any good if they tried. The provocative element in McGann’s position for them will be his serious belief in the centrality of the role of the ...”

“... Among those who count as friends, rather than passing acquaintances, are Marguerite Yourcenar, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola (among several interesting photographs is one of Richie beside a gawky, 19-year-old Sofia Coppola, who looks thoroughly lost). He knew Ozu and Kurosawa, and wrote books about their work. Then there were ...”