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“... All suicide, we are to believe, is painful, messy, undignified and inconvenient. Or as Dorothy Parker (an inveterate botcher of suicide) put it: Razors pain you; Rivers are damp; Acids stain you; And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful; Nooses give; Gas smells awful; You might as well live. Britain’s policy of benign censorship keeps the annual ...”

“... He wrote slowly; he rewrote thoroughly; he groaned over his work. He showed me the gold nib of his Parker pen, worn to a slant from use.He rejected the notion that other writers influenced him – influence, it was implied, was a sign of being second-rate. He disliked being compared to anyone else. He said he had come from an island with no literature, no ...”

“... their families in ersatz châteaux and the legendary jazz scene – Truman may have heard Charlie Parker live – was a middle-class affair found in labour union halls rather than bordellos. Two Irish gangs, the Goats and the Rabbits, fought for control of the city. Tom Pendergast, the cunning, sickly boss of the Goats, ran his operations out of a two-storey ...”

“... sort of doubt about Cain’s wife, or the Old Testament miracles or the Consecration of Archbishop Parker ... No, it was something deeper than that. I couldn’t understand why God had made the world at all.’Catholicism explained to Waugh why the world was as evil and horrible as it was. Catholicism explained the vile bodies in it. It also explained to him ...”