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“... Broadway theatre, not to see a play but to enjoy what was meant to be a thrilling contest between Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. The place was packed; except for those sponsored by some publisher, the audience had bought very expensive tickets, and they displayed a keenness more appropriate to a prizefight. Indeed a prizefight was what they expected, Mailer ...”

“... gives the evocative name ‘Bloom’. Bellow appears in the book only as the author of an eight-page ‘Foreword’, in which he introduces us to his principal and only character. Right away one thought of Herzog, the super-kvetch of all kvetches. But here again, in his foreword to Bloom or ‘Bloom’, Bellow kept us guessing. As he phrased it ...”

“... that read G.M. Trevelyan or the old Pelican History simply by trying harder is reminiscent of Norman Tebbit on the unemployed or Mrs Shephard on state education – wishful thinking (and ahistorical). Revealingly, the old Pelican series, which Cannadine himself describes as exemplary, observed what was then a well-established convention whereby ...”

“... James Hansford devotes almost twenty pages to a story whose original manuscript consists of a bare page of typescript,1 But the apparent-neglect of due critical economy is easily explained by the character of Beckett’s corpus of writings. To borrow the term which Micher Butor coined for Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, these writings form a ‘mobile ...”

“... editor of Esquire, Lish was the chief tactician, technician and propagator of minimalism as a page-sized theatre of operation; his editorial pencil slashed like Zorro’s sword through fatty tissue and descriptive frou-frou, the severity of his cuts to Raymond Carver’s prose precipitating a controversy that still roils. Lish’s pedagogical ...”

“... came to introduce Atlas Eclipticalis to the audience, Bernstein spoke of notes being placed on the page with the intention of provoking ‘accident’; this, as he euphemistically put it, had involved a certain amount of psychological readjustment on the part of the orchestra. ‘They are artists,’ he continued, ‘trained to reproduce with exquisite ...”

“... co-star on two films including Macao – the film which prompted Howard Hughes to write a multi-page memo on the subject of her breasts – was asked to choose her favourite Mitchum film, she said: ‘I just like . . . Robert Mitchum movies.’ It’s a sentiment many film-watchers have shared, and one Mitchum would have loved, while pretending not to.Steve ...”

“... the best word possible’. Implicitly he was talking about subject, object, modifier, but on the page you can see him working his queerest alchemy in the more obscure realm of tense. His reluctance to analyse his style publicly is in inverse proportion to the degree by which he must analyse it privately in writing it; only a writer very confident in his ...”

“... Thus in his brilliant, stylish and still necessary ‘Master Musicians’ study of 1946, Norman Suckling could write: ‘The use made by Fauré of these ancient forms of musical speech consisted ... in a development of them along lines different from those followed in the course of musical history; he went back as it were to the fork of the roads and ...”

“... however choice some of the titbits, could have made a dull book. In fact, there is seldom a dull page, because Gay writes with lucidity, elegance and an affectionate relish for the quirks, twists, stratagems, evasions, paradoxes and ambiguities of the middle-class mind, which is at once universal and his own. The description of that mind in the terms of ...”

“... errors, such as the misspelling of the name of Mrs Humphry Ward; a pair of footnotes on page 378 so thoroughly entangled and misleading that nothing but beginning again could straighten them out; and two mentions by Morris of ‘grice’ sent as gifts just after the Glorious Twelfth which surely refer jokingly to grouse not to ‘Young pigs or ...”

“... to do heavy housework in the nude (with the odd lash if he bungles it), a third will carry a page of dialogue which he will want his girl to read out with him: the climax comes when she beats him for not washing out his ears. When Cynthia describes these goings-on she sounds like some kindly old repertory bore: director, stage manager and wardrobe ...”

“... valued, foreigner: ‘At home on the outskirts of Sheffield, the great steel town of Yorkshire, Mr Norman Pickering kissed his wife and daughter farewell …’ Would Bennett have ventured that (for us) redundant information as to Sheffield’s location and industry? But Bennett, of course, was a best-seller of a previous era and 80 per cent of his income was ...”

“... do I preach’), his politics (‘I’m a Tory who votes Labour. A “Left Conservative” as Norman Mailer so charmingly and conveniently puts it’), even his class (‘in any dialectical analysis ... we are part of them, the bosses, and should be pulled down’). At once defensive yet assured, such self-scrutiny is a disarming feature of many of ...”

“... warned at the outset, offers a sympathetic reassessment of a prophet by his admirers. On the page facing the contents, an encomium that appeared in the Telegraph at the time of his death in 1998 is reprinted: ‘Powell will survive more surely than any other British politician of the 20th century except Winston Churchill.’ The dozen or so contributors ...”