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“... on the deal that I had signed with Andrew under duress … The head of the record company [Mark Dean of Innervision] turns up with these contracts and we go to this greasy spoon café and he says: ‘Look, if you don’t sign this now, the deal is going away, you won’t have finished demos to take away with you, you ...”

“... entirely to believe in a film until it actually happens, it does seem likely that this autumn we will be shooting The Lady in the Van. This is the story of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly eccentric who took up residence in my garden in 1974, living there in a van until her death 15 years later. Maggie Smith played Miss Shepherd on the stage in 1999 and ...”

“... two monumental Transgender Studies readers, published in 2006 and 2013, however obsessed we may be with the most glamorous instances, most transsexual lives ‘are not fabulous’. In 2013 the level of unemployment among trans people in the US was reported to be 14 per cent, double the level in the general population; 44 per cent were ...”

“... ball, but once you leave hospital, the GP becomes your access to any help,’ she explained. ‘We fell foul of a lot of reforms that have taken place.’ Fisher was 48 when he died, ‘an influential writer, music blogger and university lecturer’, the Ipswich Star reported, who taught in the Visual Cultures department at Goldsmiths in South-East ...”

“... his pants to be held up by suspenders? The decisions, and the colouration, are irrevocable. So we might fantasise the translator of our dreams: someone, naturally, who admires the novel and its author, and who sympathises with its heroine; a woman, perhaps, to help us better navigate the sexual politics of the time; someone with excellent French and better ...”

“...  10 January. After supper at the National Portrait Gallery restaurant we go next door to the National Gallery, still after all these years a great luxury to be able to go in after hours. Walking through the galleries with the lights springing on as we pass through each door it’s always a temptation to turn aside and look at old favourites, but we press on to the basement of the Sainsbury Wing and the Late Rembrandt show ...”

“... the disaster: ‘certain public prints have betrayed in gothic letters their satisfaction.’) We last see Petersen in a courtroom where he fails to persuade a British inquiry to bring charges against Ismay. We are also shown upstanding German passengers in steerage in stark contrast to the British sleaze in First ...”

“... the sea. Stevenson looked from the top window and saw his characters out there: Billy Bones, Long John Silver and the emerging cast of Kidnapped. The Channel was busy with the ghosts of real seafarers, such as the smuggler Slippery Rogers, who once came to Bournemouth in a boat rowed by forty men, carrying thirty thousand gallons of Dutch brandy. For ...”

“... were on the first floor; the dining-room was only one door away from the waiting-room, ‘so we grew up eating more quietly and quickly than most families.’ The household comprised a living-in maid on the third floor, a laundress who worked in the basement and a passionate Italian gardener; however, his mother always did the cooking, even when there ...”

“... me by the hair at the back of my head and said to me ‘Come.’ What followed was the sensations we have all experienced. But the sweet clasp of my hair accompanied by that single word – that still gives me a sensation of happiness every time I think of it.In his adult life, this inverted power dynamic repeated itself. Turgenev was passionate – some ...”

“... his five war sonnets, his most famous and least typical poems, which had just been praised by the dean of St Paul’s for their ‘pure and elevated patriotism’. Churchill’s threnody to an already mythical soldier-poet appeared in the Times three days after his death: ‘Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classical symmetry of mind and ...”

“... to express a sense of absence or loss, a form of keening for a vanished world. Now, it is said, we only have specialists, experts who address other experts, uninterested in and unintelligible to those outside the walls; but then, wide-ranging, readable critics addressed their fellow common readers on equal terms (quite when ‘then’ was turns out to be ...”

“... cold and affected’. Later on, Gottlieb notes, the American Gilded Age novelist William Dean Howells ‘dismissed her Hamlet as a triple impertinence: not merely French and feminine, but Jewish as well’.) Andy Warhol, among others, seems to have been intrigued by the Jewish Bernhardt. In his gorgeous (and curiously undersung) silkscreen series Ten ...”

“... of foreign fighters and weapons across the border. ‘If the American public saw the intelligence we were producing daily, at the most sensitive level, they would go ballistic,’ Flynn told me. ‘We understood Isis’s long-term strategy and its campaign plans, and we also discussed the ...”

“... Innes among others. But the true English ‘classics’ of the 1920s and Thirties, the books we evoke in recalling a body in a locked library in a country house, hardly go in for artistry. V.S. Pritchett once wrote down the whole genre as philistine, and many are notably badly written, their characters stereotypes and their language a cliché. These ...”