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“... by day and by night. No great imaginative leap was required to get from Valley of the Dolls or Harold Robbins to Kelley’s first entry into the lists of homicidal biography, Jackie Oh!, the story of a quiet widow who turned out to be a money-grubbing whore. The new breed of celebrity (and celebrity-monger) that birthed in the 1980s, also girthed in the ...”

“... all, that it was too much of a responsibility. Dagmar’s murderer was Sydney Sinclair, a.k.a. Harold Hagger, 45 years old, a bigamist, several times an army deserter under various names, a petty but violent criminal with 17 charges on his sheet, and a regular inmate of prisons around the country. He seems to have been given up on at an early age by his ...”

“... between Proust, Mann, Gide, Genet, Forster, Woolf, Stein, Langston Hughes, Djuna Barnes and Henry James, it may be more accurate to say that the modernist novel is a queer invention with a smattering of heterosexual imitators, many of them notably preoccupied with queer concerns. After the war, the mantle was passed from Vidal, Isherwood, Baldwin and Capote ...”

“... notorious episodes of the double-helix story took place – the episodes that involved Crick and James Watson. Perutz’s role appears rather shady in Ferry’s account. As is fairly well known, Watson and Crick made use of unpublished data, from Rosalind Franklin’s rival group at King’s College London, in coming to their conclusions about the shape of ...”

“... a marketing tag, not a manifesto – caused a stir when it was published in the US in June. James Wood reviewed it at length in the New Yorker. Heti, he said, ‘may well have identified a central dialectic of 21st-century postmodern being’, but he also complained that her ‘prose is what one might charitably call basic’. The radical feminist ...”

“... de Man on Proust, Gilles Deleuze on Kafka, Gérard Genette on Flaubert, Hélène Cixous on Joyce, Harold Bloom on Wallace Stevens, J. Hillis Miller on Henry James. Some theorists are slapdash readers, but so are some non-theoretical critics. Derrida is so perversely myopic a reader, doggedly pursuing the finest flickers of ...”

“... his misogyny, his conservatism, his theological bad faith, the gratuitousness of his language. To Harold Bloom, Updike is ‘a minor writer with a major style’. Gore Vidal thinks that Updike ‘describes to no purpose’. James Wood complains that Updike fills his characters’ thoughts with showy phrases that don’t ...”

“... couldn’t think about Italy at the same time even if we’d wanted to. Resisting this tendency, James Holland’s previous works – on Sicily and the mainland campaign of 1944-45, among other things – have raised awareness of what happened in Italy and why. It was never an untold story, but definitely an under-told one, especially regarding 1943. As ...”

“... was more practical: he included useful remarks about sites and materials, and suggested his own St James Piccadilly as a good, economical model. But the two architects agreed on many things, in particular that the new churches should stand free and not be crammed into the tight, built-up corners many City churches occupy.On the whole the Commissioners followed ...”

“... Tristan und Isolde suggests: ‘Öd’ und leer das Meer’ (‘Desolate and empty the sea’). James Miller was the first critic inspired by Peter’s speculations and the appearance of the drafts to attempt a thorough outing of Eliot. His T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (1977) offered ‘new interpretations’ of much of Eliot’s early work, and found ...”

“... In one of literary history’s great instances of the pot calling the kettle black, Henry James complained of ‘the absence of spontaneity, the excess of reflection’ in George Eliot’s work. To other readers, of course, the proportion that Eliot – or even late James – sets up between narrative spontaneity (or action and event), on the one hand, and reflection or disquisition, on the other, seems harmonious and attractive, and it’s certainly easy enough to think of novels suffering from the opposite problem of lots of action and little thought ...”

“... resignation, there were two further, short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was ...”

“... James Angleton​ , chief of counterintelligence at the CIA for twenty years, was not the ideal spy. The ideal spy is a mouse-coloured blur in the crowd, someone like George Smiley, described by his wife as ‘breathtakingly ordinary’. There was nothing ordinary about Angleton. Once experienced, his history, his appearance, his manner, and his stubborn refusal to be clear were all indelible ...”

“... and re-order, just as Kathy Acker had appropriated and re-ordered the writing of others – Harold Robbins or Cervantes or Ian Fleming or Propertius. Recently, on the radio, Leslie Dick remarked that Kathy Acker’s writing was an extension of her reading, that her plagiarism was a way of reading, or rereading, appropriating and customising what she ...”

“... the cover-up. In February 1973, after his re-election, Nixon fired Helms and replaced him with James Schlesinger. In an initiative to regain public trust as the crisis escalated, Schlesinger announced he was ‘determined that the law shall be respected’ and that anyone aware of illegal CIA activities was obliged to report them. Nixon was finally forced ...”