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“... resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got back. By his account, a ‘huge, apoplectic, stand-up row ensued’, as much about the play’s lack of narrative structure as about its ‘controversial content’, before MacTaggart, who knew original work when he saw ...”

“... A man has been mistaken for somebody else. He has been kidnapped, forced to drink a bottle of bourbon and sent off to meet his death in a stolen car. He survives, and decides it is time to get things straight. He bribes his way into the hotel room of the man he is supposed to be ...”

“... religious darkness, its democracy, its philosophical depth to rival Europe, and its fecundity’. He examines The Adventures of Augie March, The Crying of Lot 49 and Wise Blood, books ‘in which the new authority of unmarked, universal man could be borrowed and spread, and yet where its contradictions and gaps would come into relief’. His analysis of ...”

“... Oxonienses, and Sidney Lee who follows Wood in the DNB, Order and Disorder is the work of Sir Allen Apsley (1616-83). The poem described by Lee as ‘rarely accessible’, now easily accessible in David Norbrook’s modern spelling edition, offers according to Norbrook ‘a particularly strong corrective to the conventional view that literature after 1660 ...”

“... keep in hard covers’. Five days later, Williams got a rejection letter from a university press he’d been trying to interest in a collection of his poems. The letter quoted a reader’s report: his imagery was ‘banal’, his philosophical musings ‘scarcely worthy of serious consideration’.Williams, who was 41 and in charge of a creative writing ...”

“... to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality ...”

“... narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety. Ashenden, who finds most of Driffield’s novels ...”

“... I was an Observer reader as a schoolboy. On most Sundays in the year or two either side of 1960 he would take the bus six miles to our nearest town and return with a paper that augmented the Sunday Post – delivered to the door that morning by the village newsagent – and its claustrophobic worldview formed fifty years before in Presbyterian Dundee. Where ...”

“... Wilson continues to impress because even at his chattiest and most off-the-cuff (as here) he manages to flavour what he says with intellectual surprise: some quick sprinkle or soupçon of conceptual magic. Here it must be that arresting phrase, the right to play. Like Beaton, the Sitwells, Cole Porter, Nancy ...”