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“... Driving across America, one of the characters in Richard Powers’s new novel remarks that the whole country has become a gigantic theme park. The same impression might have been gained from reading American novels, or from going to the movies. From Oklahoma to Mount Rushmore, and from the Devil’s Tower to Zabriskie Point, the activities of being on the road and imagining being on the road feed into one another, as one might expect ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”

“... the chairman corrected her. ‘ “Mr Harold” has.’ Here, in a nutshell, is the theme of Richard Davenport-Hines’s book. Its early chapters form a heroic chronicle of upward social mobility. We first encounter an earlier Daniel Macmillan as a mid 18th-century crofter, scratching a living from the desolate but sublime landscape of the Isle of ...”

“... diminutive has never been so well-deserved, features a mere speck of a girl lost amid a towering grove of trees in a needle’s eye; only after one’s eyes have grown accustomed to the microscopic detail is it possible to see that she carries a tiny basket in her hand.In 1980, sensing trouble ahead in Armenia, Sandaldjian gathered up his family and left for ...”

“... with Japanese to a degree he makes plain even to me who know not a syllable of the language, Richard Bowring has forfeited some command of English. That looks all the likelier when he skids into bad grammar: ‘ ... sent to whomever was to copy out the story’. Or perhaps both the ‘indiscrete’ and the ‘whomever’ are misprints. If so, there is ...”

“... world and back again. Here, at the end, Mount is on the trail of one of the book’s heroes, Richard Jefferies, Victorian polymath, nature writer, campaigner against the exploitation of agricultural labourers, fantasist and (in Mount’s semi-serious conceit) a 19th-century avatar of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. One of Jefferies’s favourite ...”

“... there was Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, an adagio from Haydn, a speech by Richard Wollheim, and no fewer than 13 of Spender’s own poems, read by Harold Pinter, Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Jill Balcon and Barry Humphries. (At Larkin’s, there were three.) Spender’s order of service, despite his obvious absence, seems to acknowledge ...”

“... novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and nastiness, vanity, callousness, lust for blood, but – like a French Impressionist – utter black is not a colour for him. Cobb is most moving and persuasive when he speaks of women and fugitives. ‘A deserter cannot ...”

“... Scottish religious and social opinion’. Jake and Jill live ‘anticlimactically’ in Ladbroke Grove, with two children who often manage, not being Scottish, contentment beyond Kelvin’s kids. The Fall of Kelvin Walker seems a perplexing departure from Gray’s earlier work, disarmingly simple in construction and typographically unadventurous. Gray ...”

“... equally conclusively, that formulations in this relativistic style that have been popularised by Richard Rorty, in particular, simply tear themselves apart. If, as Rorty is fond of putting it, the correct description of the world (for us) is a matter of what we find it convenient to say, and if, as Rorty admits, we find it convenient to say that science ...”

“... of English gallantry and the English gentleman in John Buchan’s fiction. When Buchan’s Richard Hannay philosophises about the German character, however, his diagnosis is comparable to Wells on the English: ‘That is the weakness of the German. He has no gift for laying himself alongside different types of men ... In Germany only the Jew can get ...”

“... the first disco party on the West Coast, two thousand people filled the Gay Community Centre on Grove Street. There was ‘dancing, fire eaters, orgy rooms, everything’, Gunn wrote. Later, Noseworthy ran membership at the Saint, a gay superclub in the East Village which held elaborate monthly disco parties. ‘It’s like a maître d’s job for three ...”

“... of the alterations are minimal: ‘British’ becomes ‘English’; the ‘latest’ edition of Grove is now a ‘recent’ edition, and so on. Other changes seem to display a shift in Mr Laurence’s romantic emphases: Greer Garson arrives; Leonard Bernstein departs. More interesting is the partial reversal of Mr Laurence’s estimate of Shaw’s criticism ...”

“... the most expensive hotel in the world Is the smell of rain about to fall. It does the opposite, a grove of lemon trees. I isn’t anything. It is the hooks of rain Hovering with their sweets inches off the ground. I is the spiders marching through the air. The excellent smell of rain before it falls overpowers The last aristocrats on earth before the ...”

“... Elektra became a marriage guidance counsellor and found herself being interviewed on Panorama by Richard Dimbleby, along with L.S. Lowry and a costermonger. She was less than dazzled by her moment of celebrity, thinking it rather a waste of time and the Lime Grove studios ‘dreary and tumbledown’. In 1973 she was ...”