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“... and 17th-century literature, and that his most important early mentor had been the eccentric D.J. Gordon, who specialised in the relations between literature and spectacle in the Stuart period. So the venue and the occasion for this early exercise in learned reviewing made sense. I also knew that at this stage in his life Frank had been particularly impressed ...”

“... million a year developing their vehicles, or £380 million if you include engines. ROKiT Williams Racing, the lowest-spending team of the last few years, had a budget of £106 million in 2019; its car was the slowest on the grid by far. Most drivers start young, racing in go-karts from the age of five or six and moving up through Formulas 4, 3 and 2 ...”

“... doesn’t touch, and the conventional way of testing serious allegations is to hold a trial. A.T. Williams’s A Very British Killing is concerned with one such prosecution. The story at its centre began on a Sunday morning in September 2003, as British troops conducted a swoop on a Basra hotel. Six months on from the US-led invasion, with coalition forces ...”

“... your twenties, facing Sampras or Philippoussis or Ivanisevic, or even Navratilova, Hingis or Venus Williams: can’t be done, no way at all even of being on the same court, much less hitting their balls back. Two decades ago, wooden rackets were replaced by high-tech instruments engineered to the utmost in hitting efficiency, and daily restrung, for ever more ...”

“... Alvarez’s little piece, ‘Doctor in the House’, which turns out not to be a homage to Richard Gordon (sadly), but a two-and-a-half-page chat about the problems of getting his house redecorated. Mr Alvarez’s wife makes no fewer than seven appearances in this brief narrative, yet her name is not mentioned once: this in spite of the fact that the other ...”

“... Jungle Band’s most extraordinary sounds were produced by the trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams (who took Miley’s place in 1929) and the trombonist Joe Nanton, whose nickname ‘Tricky Sam’ projected the essence of ‘jungle’ techniques. Following the example of King Oliver, they developed a wider variety of often speech-like growling and ...”

“... when its first anthology was published, the names of contributors included Pound, William Carlos Williams, E.E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore. For 35 years Pound advised, instructed, cajoled, abused, while Laughlin for the most part acted on the good advice, ignored the bad, and behaved with a degree of patrician independence proper to a man ...”

“... these matters his new partner, who has stayed with him for the whole of his business life, Gordon White, boasted to a Sunday Mirror gossip columnist: ‘Why should I marry? I don’t need anyone to look after me. I’ve got a good housekeeper to darn my socks, sew on my buttons and cook my meals.’ White managed to dispense even with his housekeeper ...”

“... in the trenches of 1984, powerful though those experiences and memories are.’ The best Granville Williams can do to soften the wounds of retrospect is an afterword on ‘Coal and Climate Change’, in which he maintains that the closure programme that led to the great strike was mistaken. It may have damaged the NUM, disabled the foundations of the ...”

“... Like many​ recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it ...”

“... greatest symphonist since Beethoven, had no interest in folksong (though he studied with Vaughan Williams and liked and respected him), adored jazz for its virtuosity and instrumental sound but had little patience with most of the so-called symphonic jazz of the 1920s. The key to this apparent ragbag of a pantheon is that Lambert had come to music from ...”

“... his wife headed off for Paris (Tate had married the fierce and ultra-Southern novelist, Caroline Gordon, a few years before: he would later marry her again, after a divorce, and then divorce her yet again). In Paris, he fell in with all the usual Steins and Hemingways – who met, the lot of them, with his fierce disapproval. ‘More and more,’ he said, he ...”

“... that the scheme would be discredited. One woman who had votes ‘dumped’ on her was Mildred Gordon, who, Harman says, ‘had not particularly made her mark’ in Parliament. She was ‘nearly elected’ (this isn’t true: she got 45 votes; the last person to be elected, John Prescott, got 85; Harman got 68) and was ‘amazed and happy … that at last ...”

“... hidey-holes in whatever she said.’In his acknowledgments to this book, Lutz proclaims: ‘To Gordon Lish I owe everything.’ Asked about Lish’s influence on his work in a 2006 interview, Lutz recalled ‘nosing about in bookstores in the mid-1980s’ and being ‘struck by certain slim books of prose fiction in which the sentences all but protruded ...”

“... reply. Drafting a sketch for a BBC radio programme on devolution, I was rung by Professor Phil Williams, a colleague at Aberystwyth who is also Plaid Cymru’s spokesman on energy. ‘I’m on it with Jack McConnell,’ I said. ‘Who’s McConnell?’ ‘Scottish First Minister.’ ‘Well, I never . . .’ This was a benign version of the Jowett ...”