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“... James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz Age and worked together in the city rooms ...”

“... English-speakers) to just the degree that among the compatriots of Betjeman and Larkin and Adrian Mitchell he is a prophet without much honour; and there has not been lacking the rather plain implication: ‘Go and live with those furriners that like you so much.’ But Tomlinson won’t go away; and he insists on publishing in his native country – thanks ...”

“... of the violence, and remorse for that violence, felt by the baby towards the mother. It was Donald Winnicott who pointed out that the mother hates the baby before the baby hates her. Bourgeois’s own experience as a child and as a mother (she had three sons) had taught her that the ambivalence between mother and child goes both ways. For her the mother ...”

“... outskirts of Moscow, when they buried Kim Philby. Guy Burgess had died in 1963, Anthony Blunt and Donald Maclean in 1983. Philby, however, was still alive when I started work in Moscow as the Independent’s correspondent there in early 1987, and his presence was a source of recurrent nightmares. Naturally I had put out feelers for an interview, but they led ...”

“... healers and psychopharmacologists have failed to keep your child alive, there’s W.J.T. Mitchell’s Mental Traveller: A Father, a Son and a Journey through Schizophrenia, with its emphasis on journey, discovery, finding strength in what remains.* Mitchell is fond of quoting Leonard Cohen – ‘there is a crack ...”

“... effect, between rhetorical coercion and solicitation of resistance is clear in the scene in which Donald Sutherland delivers a long monologue to Kevin Costner on the Mall in Washington DC, the great monuments to the republic arrayed around them. Sutherland as a mysterious ‘Mr X’ lays out the full scope of the conspiracy for the wide-eyed innocence of ...”

“... was placed under the guidance of two former instructors in resistance to torture, James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. Like the agents they supervised, Mitchell and Jessen are protected by pseudonyms, but earlier reporting in their case has made it possible to penetrate the disguise. Their strategy was to ‘reverse ...”

“... is veering in just the opposite direction – away from formalism and explication de texte. Donald Davie declares that ‘criticism as an institution does not, and never did exist,’ thereby establishing his claim to being further out of touch with reality than anyone else in this volume. Davie means to say, of course, that criticism as an institution ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... characters creak wincingly about the stage: the ignorant physician (‘There was no chance that Donald would diagnose thallium poisoning. Donald couldn’t diagnose a common cold’), the lumpish child (‘She went to piano. She went to ballet. She went to drama classes. She went to lessons in drawing, ice-skating, junior ...”

“... Anatoli Golitsin. Largely at Martin’s insistence, MI5’s own deputy director-general, Graham Mitchell, was put under surveillance on suspicion of being a Soviet agent. The director-general, Sir Roger Hollis, concluded – probably correctly – that the obsessive hunt for traitors was undermining MI5 morale. Martin was taken off the Blunt case and moved ...”

“... information to light. Its blurb called it ‘the only serious biography of the man himself’. Now Donald Spoto, author of The Art of Alfred Hitchcock (1976), has undertaken to show The Dark Side of Genius, on the ground that (according to his blurb) ‘the intensely private, secretive Hitchcock eluded the serious biographer until now.’ This is unfair to ...”

“... who had ‘recently married an American GI’ and ‘hopes to come to the States’. The GI was Mitchell Goodman, an ex-artillery officer and aspiring novelist who proposed to Levertov so soon after meeting her in a Geneva hostel that she called him ‘Goodwin’ in a letter home. She told her parents she wasn’t ‘romantically in love’ with him, but ...”

“... But he never shows why such claims are necessary for Foucault’s specific projects. Even Donald Davidson, on whose views Norris relies extensively in arguing against relativism, insists that we cannot recognise a conceptual framework or tradition unless we are in broad agreement with most of its elements. Davidson’s view, therefore, explicitly ...”

“... US, Europe and South America with a medley of scenes from Shakespeare. ‘His voice was quiet,’ Donald Spoto writes in his new study of the Redgrave family, but still expressive, and his gait often unsteady, but audiences seemed to provide him with a shot of adrenalin, and spectators were invariably impressed by the presence of Sir Michael Redgrave, still ...”