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“... Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still occasionally practising, came to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand in 1928. He boxed, rowed and through the Carlton Club became a protégé of Nancy Astor. Their ...”

“... bar a few hundred miles away from the mud-walled bar near Zaria, in northern Nigeria, where John Haynes’s poem is set. It opens with an evocative drift through the peppery air of the evening marketplace, past the stalls selling stock cubes and mosquito coils, and the smells of fried yam and charcoal fires, towards the coloured lights of Patience’s ...”

“... express speed to provide for his widow, and can’t stop. He is not quite the equal of my friend John Creasey, who once told me he tried to keep himself down to writing a dozen crime stories a year but found he wrote 14. The Burgess production rate worked out at five and a half novels in the pseudo-terminal year. And eight years later it was his wife who ...”

“... action, as cringing as it is brave. In Henry IV, it is the women who speak the truth: ‘No, Sir John,’ Mistress Quickly says to Falstaff when he insists he knows she has been hostess to petty crime. ‘You do not know me, Sir John; I know you, Sir John.’ As with Lady Percy, it is ...”

“... began by acknowledging the ‘curiosity aroused in me by Tennyson’s Maud and Locksley Hall, ostensibly dramatic poems which were strangely flawed, I always felt, by some hidden emotional connection with the poet’s own life. What was it?’ It was, Rader discovered, the steamy psycho-sexual drama of Tennyson’s premarital affair with Rosa ...”

“... another angle it was the amour fou Fenchurch’s life. Bella was not your Donald McGill, music-hall-joke mother-in-law. Hot Mediterranean blood ran in her veins and she was exotic, at least by Ardsley standards. But she was 34 years older than him (old enough to be his granny), it was Yorkshire, in the Fifties. As well make love to a pit pony and expect ...”

“... into the literary zeitgeist, has, in other words, done its bit to undermine the sloppy, liberty-hall notion of writing that takes it to be something best done uncorseted and to draw attention to the bracing element of the deliberate and the impersonal that firms literature up. Far from wanting to ride with the avant-garde, Oulipians are reactionary in ...”

“... of his specimens are lost, and at the start of the novella he has washed up penniless at Bredely Hall, the Gothic mansion of the Rev. Harald Alabaster, a baronet, liberal churchman and anti-Darwinian collector of zoological specimens, who is attempting to write a lengthy vindication of the argument from design. At Bredely he meets Alabaster’s sad and ...”

“... private life’, the life of a typical bourgeois academic, dividing his time between the lecture hall and the family home. His marriage was happy, and he cherished his only child, a daughter who was profoundly deaf but went on to be a successful artist. He was frugal, temperate and quiet. He was also a vegetarian; Einstein, by contrast, was a full-blooded ...”

“... local specialisms. Birmingham was strong in industrial sociology, and Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall had pioneered cultural studies there. Thirty-odd miles away at Leicester University, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias gave the sociology department a more theoretical and international focus. Evaluation has had the effect of dispersing such centres. A ...”

“... its nature always mutable. There was no crisis from which it did not emerge invigorated. John Nash designed Piccadilly Circus as a rond-point for his great picturesque town plan leading up Regent Street to the Regent’s Park. The view south was to culminate in the Prince Regent’s Palace at Carlton House. Long before the work was ...”

“... he took hold of my ear. I stood in the corner near the insect case, remembering my bike. I had the John Bull Puncture Repair Kit in my pocket: glass paper, rubber solution, patches, chalk and grater, spare valves. I was ‘riding dead’ – freewheeling downhill with my arms folded and my eyes shut, looking Mr Ray in the eye. Every time I looked round he ...”

“... desk, was a more engaging and dramatic affair than the traditional podium-based and town-hall meeting style debates that preceded it. Not that it broke the pattern of the series as a whole. Although the final debate saw more disagreement on substance (and more detail about policy), the most memorable section dealt with the campaign itself. As ...”

“... not slandered by this novel. A hundred years ago, Irish politicians routinely took charge of City Hall by street fighting and the power of the fist. The arch-exponent of New York knuckle politics was John Morrisey (1831-78). Born in Tipperary, Morrisey came to New York as an immigrant worker in 1848, fought his way to the ...”

“... everything short of pre-paid order forms. The illuminati have been smuggled into the Index: John Wilkinson, Peter Riley, Drew Milne, Rod Mengham and (of course) J.H. Prynne himself. Prynne and Zappa? Certainly, why not? Ben Watson (the footnotes): ‘When I asked Jeremy Prynne what he thought of Captain Beefheart, he said he thought he sounded like ...”