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“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... that ‘the people will be taken out of our hands by Emancipation, as we took them from Captain Rock by our agitation.’ The widespread ‘Rockite’ revolt of the early 1820s is not dealt with in Nationalism and Popular Protest in Ireland, but ‘Houghers’, ‘Defenders’, ‘Ribbonmen’ and Land Leaguers are. The title of this excellent volume is ...”

“... get less than 50 per cent of the primary vote, the hectic dramas of late-night scrutineering. Like David Malouf, who has spoken of Australian election days as unacknowledged national carnivals, Hardjono enjoys them hugely. Better than most in early October, she also knew that there’s worse than Pauline Hanson. The election, in which the conservative ...”

“... speech rhythms: ‘Stone sculpture apart, stone is more often conceived in the North as simply rock-like. And who will love the homogeneous marble sheets in the halls of Lyons’ Corner Houses? No hands will attempt to evoke from them a gradual life. For nowhere upon them is the human impress.’ These gestures of condescending curiosity towards the ...”

“... of Palestinian pride – large uncomfortable sofas, Palestinian flags and a miniature Dome of the Rock in mother of pearl – I tried to imagine what it must be like for a father to have his son, who is not even a soldier, killed while fighting a regular army. He didn’t want to talk about it. Instead, we spoke about the general situation. He turned to me ...”

“... time sounds quite respectable and there is general approval of Armstrong’s new girlfriend, the rock star Sheryl Crow, who climbed the Alpe a few days ago in 90 minutes. But a far more accurate impression of relative speeds can be gained on the descent. Whizzing back down to Bourg d’Oisans, fast enough to feel a twinge of fear on every bend and to ...”

“... Militant Modernism by Owen Hatherley, One-Dimensional Woman by Nina Power and The Meaning of David Cameron by Richard Seymour, all of which grew from their authors’ blogposts. Such works amounted to ‘a kernel of a whole new left public’, according to another of Fisher’s friends, Jeremy Gilbert, professor of cultural studies at the University of ...”

“... in the summer balls of her final year, her last taste of Eden. Andrew, an engineer and semipro rock musician, was initially attracted to Grace because she ‘looked like a person’ (what did he expect – a tomato?). The novel follows a year or so of their courtship, his musical career and her research. Affairs of heart, head and guitar have predictable ...”

“... is cruelty in it.’ At Oxford he made friends with two other able autobiographers, David Thomson, the future BBC producer, and Denis Hills, the African explorer, destined to be rescued by James Callaghan from the clutches of Idi Amin. Michael Wharton spent much of his term-time practising West Riding Knife Throwing with his mates, or drinking ...”

“... because of the portrait of the founder in the entrance hall, ‘the school’s chief financial rock, a fruit importer who had abandoned Presbyterianism for the Church of England when a sudden rise in wealth and status demanded the change’. Even in Saskatchewan the Church of England had a cachet that the others lacked: something to do, perhaps, with the ...”

“... wet-dream – The Martian School, The Metaphor Men. Who are they? Christopher Reid, perhaps? David Sweetman? Norman MacCaig? Philip Larkin? Seamus Heaney, perhaps? Doesn’t Heaney’s description of a lobster –articulated twigs, a rainy stonethe colour of sunk munitions –vie with Raine’sscraping its clawslike someone crouchedto keep wicket at ...”

“... gestures, glazed irony and so on. But for Moody (b.1961), as for Jonathan Franzen (b.1959) and David Foster Wallace (b.1962), the previous generation’s experimentalism was as much a way of looking at society as a renovation of novelistic technique. Writers their grouchier teachers viewed as rebarbatively modish or futuristic struck them as fairly ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... Wilson could imitate his true identity as a bluff, plain-speaking Yorkshireman to perfection. David Cameron once worked for a public relations agency and looks as though he was assembled by one. From Reagan to Schwarzenegger, the line between politics and performance has become increasingly blurred: during the US presidential debates, a soi-disant ...”

“... from the outside is what drives The Picture of Dorian Gray, or Frankenstein, or the films of David Lynch. To watch yourself from outside is, according to the textbook, to watch yourself as dead – and both Hall and his hero understand this all too well. Holed up in his flat, Eric Sanderson reads letter after letter sent to him by ‘the First Eric ...”