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“... Will Rogers died in 1935 the most loved man in America. Ray Robinson, who was 14 years old, remembers the news reaching his summer camp by radio and spreading like wildfire from bungalow to bungalow. No death since Abraham Lincoln’s (the kidnapping and killing of the Lindbergh child aside) had moved the country so much ...”

“... majority of which I passed on to my colleagues. But there was one patient I did consent to see – Ray. The day after seeing Ray, it seemed to me that I noticed three Touretters in the street in downtown New York. I was confounded, for Tourette’s syndrome was said to be excessively rare. It had an incidence, I had read, of ...”

“... of social isolation: a college student meets a fat lesbian, a nurse with menstrual trouble meets a man with no legs. The central characters themselves are fully alive, and each story shows that race is only one element in their sense of themselves as people apart. Packer can be very funny, making us see and laugh at the gulf between our ...”

“... alarmed and alarming, with staring eyes. Her anxieties aren’t always so evident: she sat for Man Ray in 1934 and looks cool, quizzical and rather formidable. Again, snapped by Leonard in September 1932 with T.S. Eliot and his wife, Vivienne, whom he was about to leave, she stands calmly beside Tom. Vivienne, seemingly excluded by the successful ...”

“... in Paris. A list of her friends, lovers and associates during these two decades is impressive. Man Ray photographed her, Jean Cocteau sketched her, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot praised her work, Aleister Crowley exploited it. In the Twenties Harold Acton came across her in Paris, not exactly among ‘the bevies of truculent women’ who surrounded ...”

“... Taxi to Carnavalet – couldn’t remember name of street (de Sévigné), neither could taxi-man, who took us on a tour of the entire Marais before finally dropping us apologetically at adjacent corner. The narrow streets of the Marais are almost all one-way. Carnavalet well worth detours however. First visit, so all is unfamiliar. Much more to see than ...”

“... or met almost everyone, cut a strikingly beautiful figure, became Exhibit A for Imagism. In The Man Who Died, D. H. Lawrence figured her as the Priestess of Isis. Follow as she travels to Greece on a boat with Havelock Ellis, finds herself in Egypt just when King Tut’s tomb is opened, gets photographed by ...”

“... that Joanna Drew, a curator at the Hayward Gallery, had found cocoons huddled in the slits of his Man with a Sheep, Picasso said that at Vauvenargues one day he had felt a wasps’ nest between the sheep’s legs; nothing more natural: animals lurking in the animal. Picasso always wanted the statue to be accessible to everyone, so that the children could play ...”

“... phonographic players, tape recorders, even a Burroughs adding machine, invented by the big man’s grandfather. Near the entrance we’re greeted by a looping, annotated diagram of Beat affiliations, about four metres long and a metre high – a psychohistory of the movement, recording who met whom and where, and mapping the passage of dozens of people ...”

“... seems to have enjoyed playing up to the image of the Surrealist femme sauvage. She posed nude for Man Ray behind the wheel of a printing press, one palm covered with ink, her hair slicked back and her neck encircled by a thin black band. The machine’s handle suggestively juts out from her pelvis while she holds the wheel, as if she’s stroking one ...”

“... taste for ‘rough trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten, edited by Michael Nedo and Michele Ranchetti, with the caption: Wittgenstein mit dem Freund Ben Richards in London. In the article I dismiss as absurd the ...”

“... imagine that a crack dealer – particularly someone who was as much of a big-timer as this man apparently was – could find room in his schedule for a leisurely stroll around the crack dens of upper Manhattan. Thinking back on all the cop shows and police movies about cocaine kingpins that I had seen, I imagined that he would have to run off for a big ...”

“... it is no surprise to find her in a cameo role in the autobiography of the painter and photographer Man Ray, in which a starring part is allotted to Lee Miller, the universal muse of the Surrealists, who herself became a famous practitioner of gourmet cookery. Patience Gray belongs to this nexus of cookery and the arts, although she has an earthy, hands-on ...”

“... or simply telling readers to work those bits out for themselves. The narrator, an anonymous young man in an anonymous town somewhere in America, is also endlessly distracted from the game by the even more intractable problems of the rest of his life: his dead-end job manning the phones at a third-rate pizza joint, his shaky relationship with his ...”

“... the first story in The Whole Story and Other Stories (2003), which begins: ‘There was a man dwelt by a churchyard. Well, no, okay, it wasn’t always a man; in this particular case it was a woman. There was a woman dwelt by a churchyard.’ After the various false starts of The Accidental, it gradually becomes ...”