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“... on broken stone tracery is a common motif; dark interiors provide a foil for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing beside tombs or seated in Gothic cloisters. Most are dressed in the style of 1280, but some in that of 1820, and there are numerous attractive young nuns in timeless ...”

“... about the language of architecture; exactness and detail v. mood and feeling. Betjeman wrote to Norman Scarfe to praise his ‘magnificent’ book on Suffolk’s landscape and its history, and each sentence is an attack on Pevsner. ‘You write beautifully. You inform without dehumanising. There is not a hint of art history, thank God, but love of the ...”

“... characters; interrogating motives; pushing beyond his own facility at phrase-making (‘clouds white as cricketers’, the moon ‘like a button on a blazer’) to find plain words for what he has learned. As in any family history, the story at the heart of Blood-Dark Track is the writer’s own, the drama of his struggle to open a path from the present to ...”

“... No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker for allegedly colluding with our oppressors in the media. A good five minutes’ worth. I’ve never seen him so worked up. Actually, it was way over the top. Gave the impression he is rattled, which I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting ...”

“... we imagine between her face and her mask.’ The images of Doris Day (that blonde hair, those white teeth) and her personas as the spunky girl next door, the tightly wound career woman and the gung-ho housewife have been fixed for years now, but the person who played Doris Day is less clear. It’s difficult even to know what to call her. The band leader ...”

“... are still major obstacles for those who do not form part of the Bar’s core constituency of white middle-class males. Dominic makes great play of a technique of his father’s which is common to all criminal barristers, who vary their accent depending on who they are speaking to – from mockney when talking to clients in the cell to Little Lord ...”

“... and spotted a hole in the wooden panel behind it: an alcove. He shone a torch in, and saw the white torso of a woman, her head covered. He and a fellow tenant went to a kiosk to call the police. The police found two more bodies stashed away behind the first one. All three women in the alcove, Kathleen Maloney, Rita Nelson and Hectorina Maclennan, were in ...”

“... she has painted a boy with a face of conspicuous sweetness, gentle and shy: a black coat, white cuffs falling over those exquisite, boneless, long-fingered hands that only portrait painters have ever seen. In the posed portraits, he is always smiling: faintly, perhaps; impatiently, perhaps. Then there is a sketch taken from life, 1793, in the National ...”

“... American politics as if he had tripped over one of Caroline’s dolls and broken his neck in the White House nursery’ – Alexander Cockburn, the Nation, 6 January 1992. The third argument is micro-historical. It punctures holes in the details, brings up contradictory testimony, offers alternative hypotheses. It tends to trail off into ...”

“... Karl was introduced to the mighty poets of Milne’s Bar and the Abbotsford: Hugh MacDiarmid, Norman MacCaig and Robert Garioch, among others. MacIver played some of the part of a father, taking Karl all over town to whatever was happening on stage or on screen. MacCaig was to become a lifelong friend, guide and admirer; they shared the same dryness of ...”

“... Like Norman Mailer in America, Kingsley Amis has made a career out of being nasty to women. Even in the days of low consciousness, Lucky Jim had liberals protesting at its treatment of the academic spinster Margaret, a woman whose sole offence was to be physically unattractive to young men. As the woman question has grown more noticeable, Amis’s gallery of male chauvinists has grown too, until in Stanley and the Women he has created a world in which only men appear to communicate with one another, and their favourite topic is their dislike of women ...”

“... Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an open-necked shirt, and just took them by storm. And they love him.’ ‘Do you want to meet Wilfred?’ the press officer ...”

“... widely-hated Leeds United team of the early Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to suppress. The fact that the most successful ...”

“... with? If a musician listening to a tape can tell whether the fingers on the keys are black or white, should one tremble to acknowledge that the live voice, instantly distinguishable as male or female, leaves its imprint on the page? Russian is a language in which, given the laws of grammatical concordance, the lyrical ‘I’ must declare its gender all ...”

“... society. Densely populated with characters major and minor, and echoing with the table-talk at White’s and the Turf, the Colville diaries are a unique record of a governing class still functioning with superb aplomb in the midst of the People’s War. To Colville, the small world of the pre-war ruling circle was home, and he wrote in his diaries as ...”