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“... bum-banger. He later gave an avenging interview to the Face, asserting that he was the victim of a London faggot literary coterie, consisting of Martin Amis, Ian Hamilton and myself. (Amis and I contemplated a letter to the Face, saying that this was very unfair to Ian Hamilton, but then dumped the idea.) Now here is Mailer attempting the near-impossible: that ...”

“... every two days, the whole machine broke down.The man who improved on the vacuum tube was the London-born American physicist William Shockley. After the war, Shockley was employed at Bell Labs, the research branch of the US telephone monopoly, AT&T. He realised that certain chemical elements could perform a similar function of encoding and transmitting 1s ...”

“... wife’s things had been packed up by their host in Australia, then left in a room in his London home): ‘By chance her little dog came into the room in which they had been, much more than a year after the event. She had neither pined nor complained when I came back without her mistress. But when she smelt those suitcases with the familiar ...”

“... the driving force behind the setting up in 1921 of the Institute of Historical Research in London: ‘he was merciless in his domination of the system, his colleagues and his assistants, especially female ones (who included his wife).’ Many of us will recognise the breed. Some of us will even have encountered along the way latterday equivalents of ...”

“... by complaining loudly when he and Schine were not given adjoining rooms with a connecting door. In London, this improbable pair of patriotic truffle hounds created quite a stir, best summed up by an editoral in the Financial Times: Not content with the notoriety he has achieved in the United States, Mr McCarthy now proposes to bounce into British affairs. He ...”

“... indulged by again seeking backstairs access through his cronies, this time to University College London, which had the crucial advantage that Petronella could continue to be pampered at home. Verushka and Petronella can presumably chuckle all the way to the bank over the old man’s posthumous practical joke. It is a shame that his own elder brother is no ...”

“... serious issues are at stake. It was a serious matter when the Sunday Telegraph accused Mr Jack Hayward, a successful businessman, of being involved in a criminal conspiracy to murder Norman Scott, the friend of the Rt Hon. Jeremy Thorpe MP. It was a serious matter when a book by David Irving was read as suggesting that Captain Broome RN, the commander ...”

“... which this is. The scene is Ireland. Minnie, the narrator, is summoned from a dreary life in London to go back after ten years’ absence to the house on the west coast where she has spent much of her childhood. It is the residence of Hugo Pierce, the celebrated novelist. But Hugo has just been found dead in the neighbouring woods, and Minnie is needed ...”

“... a provincial medical practice on homeopathic lines to the position of a fashionable and prosperous London consultant, had studied under Freud in Vienna, although at the relevant date Freud can have been no more than nine years old. And when feeling ashamed of Dolores, the uncharacteristic novel she had published 14 years before publishing anything else, she ...”

“... 29 marking an even more unhappy failure of art to compensate for life. By March 1921 Wood was in London, packing his bags for Paris. He had been invited to stay with Alphonse Kahn. ‘one of the greatest if not the best-known connoisseur of art in Paris’, as he explained to his mother. What he did not tell her was how he had landed such a grand ...”

“... success, as a widely celebrated playwright, a wealthy baronet, and a leading figure in literary London. The stories and plays that led to these grown-up dignities were, as he understood them, grounded in a child’s make-believe. What makes him the most sophisticated and most troubling of those who constructed the early 20th-century cult of childhood is ...”

“... changefulness,’ Ashbery ‘seems to belong to every category we can imagine or desire. Our Jack of Diamonds, he is claimed at one moment for the tradition of Stein and at the next for the tradition of Stevens.’* For most of his career, he was our prize monotreme, eluding our neat categories, and if he occasionally laid an egg, you knew he would soon ...”

“... he went home and dreamed a strange dream in which ‘Old Hoppity’ turned up at Time-Life’s London offices. The dream, in time, metamorphosed into a poem, which he included in his collection The Very Man (1993). It begins: A man with a limp came towards me begging for money for liquor – spoke of cairns built of skulls, of the wind off the steppes on ...”

“... settlers in North America, Ireland and the Caribbean. But he takes issue with scholars such as Jack Greene who have interpreted all this as evidence of the emergence of an imperial identity. Rather, he suggests, these notions constituted an ideology, and as such were always contested and unstable. In the end, the British failed to find a fully satisfactory ...”

“... returns to her job at the Embassy. A crisis gathers after the bombing, clues are discovered and Jack Queller, a scapegrace CIA agent, is put on the scent. Queller was a big player way back when, ‘the guy who trained bin Laden’ and supplied his mujahids with missiles. After the Russian retreat from Afghanistan, bin Laden betrayed Queller, putting a ...”