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“... recent Clear (2004), a short but bounding novel in which characters theorise about the illusionist David Blaine, are set in London, but Barker’s territory is the hinterlands of the South-East, where literature doesn’t tend to happen – Luton, Canvey Island, the Isle of Sheppey, Ashford (‘gateway to Europe’). Despite the prizes – the Booker ...”

“... of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, or the outward appearance of the Dome of the Rock, which Christian tour-guides in Jerusalem then confidently pointed out to pilgrims as the Temple of Solomon. In more Protestant mood, you could linger in Norwich, where 17th-century Congregationalists endowed the façade of their elegant Old Meeting House ...”

“... Clash by Night (1952), Beware, My Lovely (1952), The Naked Spur (1953), Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), Men in War (1957), God’s Little Acre (1958), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), Billy Budd (1962) and The Wild Bunch (1969). In many of these films, Ryan played a bad man; in every one, he was an outsider. The parts are often separately memorable, as if ...”

“... statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up the hill. According to Max Brod, his lifelong friend and first editor and biographer, Kafka loved the movies; at times, Brod reported, he would talk about little else. For the most part, however, Kafka abstained from written commentary on ...”

“... the day’s work and any other issues that needed to be talked over’: On either side of a rock-paved lane, Two files of men are standing barefooted, Bearded, waistcoated, each with a tam-o’-shanter On his head, and most with a set half-smile That comes from their companionship with rock, With soft mists, with ...”

“... but not without hope. John Fuller’s The Burning Boys is interested in other kinds of separation. David’s mother is killed in the Blitz, and he goes to live with his down-to-earth grandmother and nubile young aunt. His life goes underground. David covertly observes the strange adult goings-on around him, approaching ...”

“... each of which is an old man remembering its name.’ And so, when Kev Howett, one of the leading rock-climbers based in the Highlands, mentioned a forthcoming expedition to Pabbay and Mingulay, as we stood under a cliff in Wester Ross last autumn, I seized the chance of travelling there at last. A new island, an uninhabited island, can fold you ...”

“... McLaren as a singer. His was the oily voice on ‘You Need Hands’, which appeared on The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle, a sort of soundtrack album released early in 1979. The film itself, which came out fourteen months later, was a fable charting McLaren’s orchestration of the rise and fall of the band he managed, the Sex Pistols. I knew that ...”

“... Good Book says, come to us all. We all know that each of us will soon disappear from the Earth. David Raup’s book compounds our pessimism by pointing out that – if humans are anything like other animals – the fate awaiting our species as a whole is also an almost certain annihilation. Very few creatures persist for long in evolutionary time. There are ...”

“... the support of a number of artists whose work has been on the interrogation playlist, including David Gray, Massive Attack and Rage against the Machine. Reprieve, the group that provides legal representation for detainees at Guantánamo, has joined with a group of musicians to form Zero dB, an initiative whose goal is ‘to end the suffering caused by music ...”

“... movies and now the video footage. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was working on the life of David O. Selznick, the man who produced Gone with the Wind, Rebecca and Duel in the Sun. It was a great help, yet a daunting obstacle, that Selznick had kept virtually every bit of paper that passed through his office. But the family archive had other ...”

“... and at hand’s span, at cubit’s reach moving, the crystalline, as inverse of water, clear over rock-bed In the Pisan Cantos, virtuality became Pound’s method as well as his topic. He felt able to be ‘inverse’ in verse: to gaze down into the ‘crystalline’ of the poetic tradition reanimated for him in Pisa by the discovery on the ‘jo-house ...”

“... novel. But Lin doesn’t do anything cute with the names: he uses them as straightforwardly as David Foster Wallace uses X and Y in ‘Octet #6’, for example, or as Lorrie Moore uses Mother and Baby in ‘People like That Are the Only People Here’. Jonathan Lethem has said that ‘strange character names are an easy way to make sure the reader ...”

“... the subterranean red churches of Lalibela in northern Ethiopia. The churches are carved from the rock to a height of more than ten metres and linked by passages, tunnels, arches, yards and trenches dug from the same rock. They are said to have been built within 23 years but stories that they were created overnight by hosts ...”

“... material. But it’s also possible to stick a bit more on. The gold collar worn by a 16th-century rock-crystal bird is there to keep its head on. If a single trunk did not serve, German limewood sculptors added a bit here and another bit there; even in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the integrity of the marble block (which, unlike limewood, was not ...”