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“... he was, on and off, to own nine, one of which he referred to as ‘The Buggers’ and hung on the wall opposite his bed. He enjoyed Bacon’s company, but, more important, he paid attention to what Bacon had to say about paint: He talked a great deal about the paint itself carrying the form, and imbuing the paint with this sort of life; he talked about ...”

“... and silk scarf, with immaculate cufflinks glinting, is reclining, travel guide in hand, on an old wall, in a parched and sunlit southern landscape, amid sandy ancient ruins. His book is appealingly personal, and if it represents a great gathering of knowledge, it also feels like something that had to be pushed out, got rid of, confessed. I found myself ...”

“... raised. Even more charitable grinding has taken place just before on behalf of a living writer, Patrick White (the contradictory demands of national and international literary histories put many cabbages out of the chronological straight line). Where Beckett, whose prose fiction deserves more consideration, gets nine lines, and Chandler only dates of birth ...”

“... the attention, an obsession with fashion detail the like of which we haven’t seen since Patrick Bateman was looking out his tie in American Psycho, and, then, of course, there’s the friends. Lulu has more than your average head for vertiginous name-dropping: it’s Elton this and John Lennon that, insecurity all the way, but this doesn’t stop ...”

“... them. The IRA was active in the complex. The first child killed in the conflict, nine-year-old Patrick Rooney, died in his family’s flat there in August 1969, after the army fired a Browning machine gun at the block during a gun battle. There was an army post on top of the tower and an army barracks just up the road in the old mill at Albert Street. Soon ...”

“... returned. He came back to England. Just in time for Margaret Thatcher. The cultural historian Patrick Wright, a man with a secret fondness for poetry (holograph Louis Zukofsky on the wall), made the trip at the same time, decanted from Vancouver. Those hazy overseas slots were vanishing and England was going mad. ‘I ...”

“... of St Bridget’s Confraternity in the early 1880s, led by Father Sheridan, a priest at St Patrick’s in Soho, mainly comprised humorous readings, with rosaries the only brief nod to observance. In his register, Sheridan constantly congratulated himself on the uproarious laughter he provoked. Priests had a relationship not only with the devout but ...”

“... is anything but. Pamela Harriman gives a welcome-to-Washington party in Georgetown, which features wall-to-wall lobbyists and power-brokers of the most traditional stripe. Campaign contributors are received and rewarded in proportion to the timeliness, and the size, of their subscriptions. The first harvest of cabinet ...”

“... and the ‘right rose tree’. It is, as he said, also ‘liable to bias’. The Queen at the wall in Ireland was not entirely unlike Willy Brandt at the Ghetto memorial. Whether ‘the ultimate reality must be anarchy’ who can presume to say? ‘Tradition is kindred’: perhaps that is true; perhaps a great cross-roaded mind has blundered: ‘nadir ...”

“... in his films is ‘in reality an effect of memory’. The same observation might be made of Patrick Modiano, whose noirish investigations of wartime Paris, spun from newspaper clippings and phone listings, often recall Melville’s cinema. Their work converges, too, in a shared feeling for Nazi-occupied Paris, their fascination with the underworlds of ...”

“... woodshed’ by her bosses, according to a Newsday report, and her career at NBC was finished. A Wall Street Journal reporter sent a personal email describing the terrible situation in Iraq: her editors pulled her out of the country and off the story. The notion of a balance between freedom and security mistakenly assumes that its benefits and burdens will ...”

“... feeding off the power. At one point, our hero (George, not Bill) takes a fancy to Jennifer Grey, Patrick Swayze’s costar in Dirty Dancing, and he gets his people to sound out her people about whether she fancies a date. Yes she does! He goes to gatherings of Greek-Americans and they crowd round wanting to know when he is going to lift the curse of Dukakis ...”

“... of intense fruit,’ combining ‘finesse and elegance with near-beefy depth’), or with the Wall Street Journal on the same type of wine (‘Moving towards the serious side, a bit hard. Not only is this wine blue-tinged, but it tastes blue-tinged, almost like roasted lilacs’). I appreciate that ‘almost’, since I haven’t a clue what roasted ...”

“... to bed, and the doorbell rang. Twelve policemen burst into the house and pinned Robert to the wall. Now he’s in prison, but I don’t know where. What shall I do?’ Rupert Everett, it is clear, has no respect for the living, however eminent. Take Mike Newell, who wanted Rupert to do a bit of work for the role of David Blakely, the guy killed by Ruth ...”

“... used to hide under an old yew tree. One of his cousins described him putting his ear against the wall that divided the garden from the graveyard, declaring that ‘the spirits of the departed’ were speaking to him. For a writer who was to become such a sage of childhood – and who throughout his life, and afterlife, would be described as childish and ...”