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“... boy for Reuters, an office boy for an auctioneer, a junior clerk for Sunlight Soap and Jordan & Co, and a cashier for an engineering company. It was sprinting he excelled at, though, which presumably served him well at Reuters, where he’d sometimes carry out his duties on roller skates. Curiously, the name given to his kind of running was ...”

“... from 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be ...”

“... more.’ The phrase picks up old slogans from Thomas Wolfe (‘You can’t go home again’) and Scott Fitzgerald (‘“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried, incredulously. “Why, of course you can”’), but it also adds its own, Vietnam-nourished insight. Willard has changed, but home has changed too, transformed itself into an idea only other people ...”

“... and Edwin Morgan veering into Loch Ness Monsterese and Mercurian.In this spirit, I edited or co-edited four anthologies during my thirties. All contained work in English, Scots and Gaelic. The two largest – The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 (co-edited with Simon Armitage) and The Penguin ...”

“... long predates the internet, as does the mentality and culture of fandom (he notes that F. Scott Fitzgerald was a fanatical supporter of the Princeton football team, to a point where he would call the coach to offer tactical advice, some of which may even have inspired a new tactic known as the ‘two-platoon system’ in the 1930s). But the internet ...”

“... he mentions ‘rackety parties’, ‘the rackety side of life’ (this in connection with Scott Fitzgerald), a ‘somewhat rackety woman’, and a character at the Oxford of Philip Larkin’s novel Jill is said to be ‘an aggressively rackety minor-public-school undergraduate’. ‘Rackety types have a link with people of the intellect,’ Powell ...”

“... the rough sea coming suddenly alive and sucking in the children?’ Stevie Smith asked, reviewing C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 1952. She liked depictions of people who disappeared into the objects of their gaze; a couple of years earlier, her poem ‘Deeply Morbid’ told the story of Joan, an office girl who goes to the National Gallery ...”

“... officials to be arrested were Richard Trunkfield, a prison officer who had sold details about James Bulger’s killer Jon Venables; Alan Tierney, a Surrey police constable who was paid £1250 for passing information that John Terry’s mother had been cautioned for shoplifting, and Ronnie Wood for assaulting his girlfriend; and Tracy Bell, a pharmacy ...”

“... his sacred cats in a basket, brings up a map of London on his screen, shifting and rearranging co-ordinates until the city conforms to his reading of it. No longer able to potter out into Notting Hill to check on some detail, he is in the position that Robin Cook found himself in when, working in a vineyard in the South of France, he decided to reinvent ...”

“... of the most prominent figures missing from Finkelstein and McCleery’s Reader, David Scott Kastan, has riffed on ‘New Criticism’, ‘New Historicism’ and ‘New Bibliography’ to dub his expertise the ‘New Boredom’.) The New Critics took ‘the poem itself’ where they found it, in cheap paperback reprints available even at ...”

“... directly or indirectly, Virginia Woolf, Socrates, Diogenes, Spinoza, Aldous Huxley, Kierkegaard, Scott Fitzgerald, Proust, Kafka, Theodore Roethke and, repeatedly, Henry James. By coincidence, the theme that holds the novel together is introduced on the opening page through Frank’s powerful identification with a murder ...”

“... one. Was the meat of cats or for cats? We didn’t have a cat and even if we had with Dad being a Co-op butcher it would have been well catered for. And again it was when I was reading the stories on the radio and happened to mention this mysterious personage in my diary in the LRB that the small mystery was solved. A cat’s meat man toured the streets ...”

“... for these long hours she would not average more than 4s a week, and very often less than that’. James Allen, a shoemaker, took his employer to the Northampton Petty Sessions in 1879 alleging that he had not been paid £1 12s 7d for work closing uppers. In 1882 London shoemakers went on strike to protest against the practice of docking part of their wages to ...”

“... Man (supp. fl. four million BC, ‘archaeological hoax’). Then comes Leir or Lear (supp. fl. c.820 BC, ‘king of Britain’), followed by several other equally doubtful types whose inclusion prompts the thought that although subjects must be dead to merit inclusion, there is no equally stringent requirement about having lived in the first place; even ...”

“... Smith), who turns seventy this year, has had just one hit single (‘Because the Night’ in 1978, co-written with Bruce Springsteen) in forty years, and the only one of her 11 albums with an unassailable reputation is her glorious debut, Horses. I’ve known many people who dearly love Horses, but I can’t recall a single person ever declaring a passion for ...”