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“... in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s son, Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, artillery officer on the Western Front, faultless husband and devoted father of three, was on a lecture tour, trying to raise money for the forthcoming all-British attempt (his third) on Mount Everest. Mallory had ...”

“... allowed to buy sweets ad lib. The same applies to thrillers and detective stories. But there’s a difference. Few dieticians or gourmets would recommend or gravely evaluate competing brands of candy: yet ‘popular culture’ – including comic strips, trash films, junk videos, and rock music – is reviewed and criticised nowadays alongside ...”

“... Humphrey Bogart was born on Christmas Day, 1899. Lauren Bacall died on 12 August 2014. So the span of William Mann’s well-researched dual biography is some 115 years. But a case can be made that the ‘greatest love affair’ promised by Mann amounted to no more than 216 minutes in the busy years of the ...”

“... conjuncture, of course, that clinched it – never did differences of age, however slight, loom so large as at that time. Larkin got the date about right, even if he skipped over the Stones. But at the time the librarian from Hull was probably no wiser than the historian from Halifax, who viewed talk of generational divisions impatiently, as a way of ...”

“... Wheatley finally achieved his long-held ambition of being elected to a really smart gentlemen’s club, White’s. On entering the building, so he told a friend, his first objective was to consult the membership book to find out how many had supported his candidacy – a gratifying 35. ‘Not bad for the Streatham born ...”

“... novels and a torrent of poems and articles, and working as a secretary at Newnes and Pearson’s publishing company. Nor is it easy to write a clear-sighted account of a gifted writer who is wily, opinionated and defensively self-descriptive: ‘This is a foot-off-the-ground novel,’ explains the narrator of Novel on Yellow Paper. ‘And if you are a ...”

“... Shadow Man Richard Layman supplies a terse explanation. It appears that Lillian Hellman, Hammett’s closest friend from 1931 onwards, took steps soon after his death to acquire legal control of all the novelist’s copyrights (despite the terms of Hammett’s will), using as an argument ...”

“... usually does come in somewhere: a phrase describing a street, a scrap of dialogue, a character’s sudden gesture. The scrap of authenticity validates the whole. Male novelists are more disingenuous about their romance than women, dividing and dramatising it, pretending to discredit by exaggeration. Ever since Jane Eyre, the female best-seller has usually ...”

“... movies in mandating and legitimising styles of dress. The notable exception is Stanley Donen’s Funny Face (1957), a Pygmalion story of Audrey Hepburn’s bookshop clerk transformed, under the guidance of Fred Astaire’s Avedon-like photographer, into a supermodel. It is a musical ...”

“... It’s quite a popular secret, the Cambridge Poetry Festival; a roomful of freelance delegates, all capable of keeping their eyes to the front, on the platform – no droolers, no crisp packets. By Saturday afternoon, a certain mid-term weariness is evident (so many readings survived, so many still to come); the post-traumatic shock of being allowed into the showpiece ...”

“... Kissinger, Mother Teresa and Bill Clinton have been among the glories of the prosecuting counsel’s art in recent years. Taking the global village as his courtroom, Hitchens asks us, the jury, to stare with wonder and loathing at these singular specimens of human depravity who are united in being parsimonious with the truth and in being the object of some ...”

“... or six hours is all I can stand,’ Masters replied. ‘I end up out of breath while he’s talking.’ One woman who met him at Sandstone, a kind of commune for swingers in California, said he was ‘very full of himself’.Comfort became best known for The Joy of Sex (1972). This annoyed him. It was his 31st book. As well as a sexologist, he was a ...”

“... a Tunbridge Wells Childhood (1983) and People and Places (1985). The stories are told with Cobb’s customary skill and enthusiasm, but they also sound an increasingly valedictory note. Cobb was dying as he wrote: the manuscript was completed two days before he died and has been prepared for the press by friends and by his widow, to whom he pays tribute in ...”

“... in 1945. He refused to find out who did, because he’d already discovered that Agatha Christie’s books were garbage and that he couldn’t put them down. This is what you’d expect. Wilson was a literary prude, and detective stories are literature’s oldest profession. They do one thing, they do it once, then they go ...”

“... glasses, bow ties, and neatly stencilled hair, he played for the literary side of Kennedy’s best and brightest, which was meant to balance out the number-crunching prowess of Robert McNamara and the Whiz Kids. In his dozens of books of American history – several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King ...”