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“... give space to Ross. She was the model for Sally Bowles, the unpolitical fuckwit at the centre of Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Isherwood had shared a flat with her. But in his novel ‘he created an ineradicable image of Jean that obscured the reality,’ an image that survived for decades into plays and films (I Am a Camera and Liza ...”

“... in the critical population has produced. So it seems, at any rate, to my generation. Recently Christopher Norris has been meditating, with his usual tact, the resemblances and differences between the Empson of The Structure of Complex Words and the Paul de Man of Allegories of Reading – a sign, perhaps, that the most neglected (and most theoretical) of ...”

“... By the late Seventies an organisation called the Violet Quill had formed, and its members – Christopher Cox, Robert Ferro, Michael Grumley, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, Edmund White and George Whitmore, together with the film critic Vito Russo and the editor and academic George Stambolian – began producing books whose examination of gay ...”

“... knitted yellow stockings, he was always quick-witted, a story-teller, an enchanter. Introducing King George VI to the Snowdon skyline, he pointed to the peak of Cnicht, remarking, ‘That bit there, Your Majesty, is my own’; then, recalling his prior duty to the idea of a Snowdonia National Park, quickly added: ‘but keep it under your Crown.’ Jonah ...”

“... solemn music as to approach the clerihew, something about which Hill makes a knowing joke: ‘Sir Christopher Wren, in or around the year seventeen ten, went to dine with some men, memorially, with a view to re-edifying the clerihew.’ Wren went to dine with some men in a clerihew by E.C. Bentley, the inventor of the form: ‘He said, “if anyone calls/Say ...”

“... of Ellington, Joni, film music, chanson. It’s a perfectly realised whole. The opening rush of ‘Christopher Tracy’s Parade’ is breathtaking: strings, trumpets, steel drums, a whole bestiary of strange vibrations swirling around in a quantum funk. A track like ‘I Wonder U’ is only 1'40" long, but seems to suggest whole new sonic horizons. Looking ...”

“... black mamba’. Nabokov responded by putting Hingley into the translation (heavily revised) of King, Queen, Knave as a department store mannequin – a literal blockhead. The odd thing is that, in addition to a critical study, Hingley was reviewing Speak, Memory, book which, like Pnin, displays Nabokov’s humanity at its most engaging. His private manner ...”

“... to be taken seriously (while not forgetting that Shakespeare is also characterised by Henry IV and King John and Timon and Cymbeline). If Dryden died three hundred years ago, then a tercentenary feels like the right moment to ask what his Hamlet is, or what it is that we now recommend him for. The interest of the question is increased, though also ...”

“... writing, and eventually managed to move Margaret and his children to the city, in 1830, to 7 Great King Street. But he was never really out of trouble, ending up more than once in the Canongate Tollbooth, for debt. The pattern of death and loss among children which had shaped his early years came back to repeat itself, with the death of his son William, in ...”

“... short distance from the centre-left to the reactionary right. In 2009, he hailed the neocon writer Christopher Caldwell, who had claimed that Muslims are ‘conquering Europe’s cities, street by street’, as a brilliant seer, who understood the consequences of undermining ‘national tradition’ with ‘liberal universalism’. It may be unfair to pick on ...”

“... even to universities – that by the early 1970s, as the historian of management consulting Christopher McKenna has argued, the major firms had ‘quite literally decentralised most of the large companies in Europe’. To keep their profits flowing in, management consultants turned to big state institutions, reorganising government ...”

“... The first of these pay-outs were made on 11 April 1992, with the former Defence Secretary Tom King, the finally jettisoned Kenneth Baker, and the former Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Brooke each receiving £8049 of public money to assuage their sense of political failure. Lord Waddington stood down as Leader of the House of Lords at the same time, for ...”

“... rain. Spend any time reviewing such images and you come to an unexpected conclusion: our supposed King of Cool is, if anything, notably un-‘iconic’. In a bandstand snap from 1948 it’s bassist Tommy Potter and a razor-cheeked young Miles who look like the hippest cadavers in town. In another band snap, from 1952, the likes of Oscar Peterson and Ben ...”

“... dead master’s work. Shortly after collaborating on Timon of Athens, Middleton had presented the King’s Men with a double-edged homage to Shakespeare, The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose protagonist is a frenetic caricature of Shakespeare’s hesitant revenger; and near the end of his career, in The Changeling, he would subject Othello to an equally bizarre ...”

“... Adventures of Augie March (his breakthrough virtuoso solo), Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King, Bellow had hit the jackpot. The much coveted Bitch-Goddess of Success was now his sugar mama. ‘Guys, I’m rich,’ he declared, and told the poet Stanley Burnshaw that if the din from Herzog grew too loud, ‘I can always stuff my ears with ...”