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“... at the opening of Harold Pinter’s first play, The Room. ‘It was the alcoholics’ paradise,’ Barry Humphries writes in his introduction to Darren Coffield’s entertaining book.You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you never knew how they arrived at the astronomical total, and alkies like to pay more anyhow. It’s our ...”

“... that in that state you are especially likely to see what you expect to see.’ The story is by Barry Pain. Despite the impression which the Oxford Book imparts, ghost stories go back a long way before the 19th century. And so does their authorial explanation. Ghosts are creatures of habit, and of Hamlet: Shakespeare’s play is a ghost story which has ...”

“... he said to me … “If you’re not too proud to live in a cottage, we’ve got an empty one, miles from anywhere.”’ We were at Glenelg; Maxwell’s house had been at Sandaig, a few miles further down the Sound of Sleat. In the book he’d disguised it as Camusfeàrna – the Bay of the Alders – by which name it ...”

“... in early 1943. (Visconti was filming Ossessione on the banks of the Po at the time, just a few miles away.) ‘Nobody had talked about humble, poor people in documentaries. Fascism totally prohibited it,’ Antonioni recalled. Rather than glorify work, as Fascist documentaries required, he emphasised privation, shooting ‘straw huts that flooded with ...”

“... dialogues with Peter Cook left very little to the imagination, so it’s not unlikely.23 March. Barry Cryer brings a good deal of old-fashioned joy into my life, as I’m sure he does for many others. His phone calls always begin, ‘It’s your stalker,’ after which without introduction he tells his latest joke. This morning’s was told originally by ...”

“... haunts all representations of history.Take, for example, Kubrick’s splendid historical film Barry Lyndon (1975), an adaptation of Thackeray’s not exactly famous novel. Its craftmanship and power aren’t enough to rescue it from a lingering feeling of gratuitousness. Why this resurrection of an 18th-century battle now? Unlike the Second World War, we ...”

“... the wind was blowing.’ Bauer tells how as a child in 1964 he watched a Reagan speech endorsing Barry Goldwater, and told his father that one day Reagan would be in the White House and he would be working for him. The story serves several purposes: it’s a nod to the last Republican President to win two terms, a reminder of the day when headbanging ...”

“... what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at Llyn Cerrig ...”

“... technocrats, Johnson went with the utopian socialists too. It was in the spirit of William Morris, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin that those family gaggles of Routemaster fans came out to bid the old version of the bus farewell, in the belief that efficiency and the bottom line aren’t enough, that the artefacts a city holds in common must be made with care ...”

“... got a couple of quarts of blackberries in his arms, picked with the morning dew, five hundred miles away.’ Edward Dorn.) Even Ben Watson, whose poodle parlour is wall to wall with off-piste names, admits (in conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and ...”

“... play a few times.’ Two of the better books written about him, Robert Johnson: Lost and Found by Barry Lee Pearson and Bill McCulloch (2003), and Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald (2004), attempt to untangle the tall tales and lies.Johnson used to be seen as a ‘primitive’, his raw experience unmediated by ...”

“... John Kolorah Blay grew up in a tiny village without electricity or running water, about seven miles away from Fort Apollonia, a former British slave-trading post. His parents sent him to an Anglican school in the closest big city, Takoradi, where he served as an altar boy. For a while, he sold kerosene after school to help pay the fees, but around the ...”

“... they turn manageable disorder into a disaster. The border with Mexico stretches for nearly 2000 miles. Much of that is underwritten by the Rio Grande, but as natural barriers go, the river is less formidable than the wilderness either side of the frontier. The harsh Sonoran Desert in the south-western borderlands runs deep into Arizona, and into the ...”

“... far in a total of 16 different homes or houses.’ Parker and his tape-recorder travelled 28,000 miles with the Anglians. To Germany, where Army wives are put under pressure by the Families Officer to be as neat and tidy as their German neighbours. To defend our ex-colony Belize against Guatemala: wives don’t go, the child prostitutes are unappealing, the ...”

“... Michael Moorcock nominate the second Confederate governor of Texas’s mansion in Bastrop, thirty miles out of Austin, as a suitable estate for his tax exile? Only the cats know. Spooky, over-refined Egyptian beasts who are let out on a leash while the dew is on the grass, but otherwise confined to quarters. Survival on the new frontier depends on three ...”