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“... there has succeeded in deposing O.J. Simpson from his place at the head of the ratings. Susan Smith, a local separated single mother, locked the doors of her car and rolled it into a lake with her two sons, one aged three and the other aged 14 months. She then went calmly to the authorities and claimed that a black man had hijacked her car and driven off ...”

“... time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham would say, is not the point. What the point is remains obscure. In 1932 the novelist Compton Mackenzie was tried for a ...”

“... hectically rhetorical, and too often mawkish or twee. The drawings are very much School of Stevie Smith, but even worse than hers, and the lay-out of the book brings to mind those reactionary underground magazines of the Sixties, where clutter and muddle were the major aesthetic aims. The title, Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded ...”

“... ignored by Phelps, was pouncable-upon as I came across it: ‘Wodehouse also helped C. Aubrey Smith, later Sir Aubrey and a Sussex and England cricketer when Plum was at Dulwich, to found the Hollywood Cricket Club ... The club became the social centre for the British colony in Los Angeles.’ That was in 1931, more than a decade before The Loved One and ...”

“... to James Strachey, Brooke describes some encounters with his fellow Rugbeian Denham Russell-Smith: We had hugged & kissed & strained, Denham & I, on & off for years – ever since that quiet evening I rubbed him, in the dark, speechlessly, in the smaller of the two Small Dorms. An abortive affair, as I told you. But in the summer holidays of 1906 ...”

“... The 20th century has seen several biographies of the last of the four, much the best of which is Christopher Hibbert’s two-volume study published nearly thirty years ago. The late E.A. Smith, who sadly died between the writing and the publication of this biography, thought that all previous studies were ‘to some degree ...”

“... nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to Proust: ‘By his impressionism I mean his non-logical ...”

“... The Longman series has a distinguished history stretching over nearly half a century. It includes Christopher Ricks’s exemplary Tennyson volume, later much enlarged to include variants from the Trinity MS, still under ban at the time of the first edition; the Milton volumes of Alastair Fowler and John Carey; and a good many others, including, more ...”

“... but I know why. Perhaps oversensitive at having been founded by an unskilled huckster named Joseph Smith, the Mormons have been acquiring some ‘background’ on the sly. They have established an International Genealogical Index, listing at least 147 million names. The aim – a classical piece of micro-megalomania where the monstrous scale of the effort ...”

“... and sees that it’s time for her meeting with Bernard Stonestreet, an ad exec in ‘a Paul Smith suit, more specifically the 118 jacket and the 11T trouser’. Cayce, by contrast, wears a ‘museum-grade replica of a US MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives’. Afterwards there’s lunch, ‘the food California-inflected Vietnamese ...”

“... Writing in the Tablet in 1951, Evelyn Waugh described Christopher Isherwood as the best of those British writers who had ‘captured’ the Thirties. It was not, Waugh being Waugh, high praise. Auden he felt to be a mysterious cove comprehensible only to his pals (among whom Waugh did not number himself). Stephen Spender, Waugh declared, had been granted at birth all the fashionable literary neuroses but his fairy godmother ‘quite forgot the gift of literary skill ...”

“... its old blanket denial and replacing it with a strategy of ‘information management’, as Christopher Moran termed it in his recent book, Classified: Secrecy and the State in Modern Britain.* Historians thought sympathetic to the intelligence services were granted privileged access to closed papers in order to produce official histories. One of them ...”

“... the celebrated victim of fatal child abuse; the crowds who wanted to do the same for Susan Smith, only to turn instantly into a lynch mob on learning that she killed her children. ‘Vicarious identification’ is just right. You hear bar-room nutters referring confidently to ‘O.J. ’, just as they once dropped the name ‘Ollie’. He’s been ...”

“... talking ‘balderdash’.) From what one hears of, say, the Queen Mother’s admiration for Ian Smith, there was a good deal of this sort of thing in royal circles. So it would be nice to think that there was another element of revenge in Princess Margaret’s later decision to head for Mustique when things got tough. Or perhaps, like Margot Beste-Chetwynde ...”

“... Before 1922 Hugh MacDiarmid did not exist. And only Christopher Murray Grieve would have dared to invent him. Alan Bold’s valuable biography points out that when the 30-year-old Grieve began to write in the Scottish Chapbook under the pseudonym ‘M’Diarmid’, he was already editing the magazine under his own name, reviewing for it as ‘Martin Gillespie’, and employing himself as its Advertising Manager (and occasional contributor), ‘A ...”