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“... history and a context. But this is not the sort of answer we get from either D.M. Thomas or Oliver Stone. Their suggestion is simpler. There is no paranoia, or paranoia is everywhere. For Thomas, this means anything goes (‘since fiction is a kind of dream, and history is a kind of dream, and this is both’). For Stone, it ...”

“... everything and everyone fit into place – the traditional role of the epic writer. His alter ego Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom thinks about this while driving home in Rabbit, Run (1960): ‘He thinks, My Valley, my home … Every corner locks against a remembered corner in his mind; every crevice, every irregularity in the paint clicks against a nick already ...”

“... by Newton more than a century later. Here he describes how King Solomon employed the ‘vegetable stone’ – a base ingredient for alchemy, combining the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) – to make ‘trees & hearbs to flourish at all times of the yeare’ and ‘bring the birds down to him out of the air to sing and chirp & sit by him but also ...”

“... crafted, is always mindful of the ordinary reader – the one E.M. Forster called ‘Uncle Harry’ – and is resolutely unbaffling. The relatively late Riceyman Steps (1923) showed that he could do doing pretty well if he chose; but he wrote bestsellers and Conrad did not. It once seemed that there was to be a major technological revolution in the ...”

“... learning’ of the Egyptians, and sent him a drawing of the hieroglyphs inscribed on an Egyptian stone, ‘with the true dimensions’. Eleven years later, though, when Evelyn met Archbishop Usher, he recorded his learned compatriot’s view that ‘Kircher was a mountebank.’ Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc helped Kircher find preferment in Rome and gain ...”

“... the story of that campaign, you might go back ten years earlier, to when De Beers’s chairman, Harry Oppenheimer, first met with representatives of a New York-based ad agency to discuss how best to market diamonds to the American public, given the Depression’s effect on sales. You could describe the agency’s strategies, which included sponsoring ...”

“... Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and Salvatore. Fitzgerald originally envisaged the novel in two parts: Part 1 would cover the events leading up to Chiara and Salvatore’s wedding in 1956; Part 2 would return to ...”

“... a failure of imagination. But there was, after all, a selfless, literary motive behind it all: Harry Evans of Random House told Brando ‘that if his company published a book about a movie star, the profits would enable him to publish books by talented unpublished authors that might not make money.’ Perhaps Harry Evans ...”

“... stable), but soon became fascinated by supernatural phenomena. There could be lucrative spin-offs. Harry Price, Fodor’s chief rival, was the best-known populariser of the paranormal. He often hit the road with the psychologist J.C. Flügel and the philosopher Cyril Joad, and reported back to John O’ London’s Weekly. His Leaves from a Psychist’s ...”

“... When​ Count Harry Kessler met Edvard Munch in Berlin early in 1895, Munch was ‘still young’, Kessler wrote, but seemed ‘worn out, tired, and in both a psychic and physical sense, hungry’. Munch was 31 and already known for his strange and shocking paintings, but he had yet to make any money from them. Kessler came up with a fund-raising scheme: a portfolio of prints by Munch, to be published by Julius Meier-Graefe and sold through his journal, Pan ...”

“... answer me Directly unto this question that I ask. In faith, I’ll break thy little finger, Harry, An if thou wilt not tell me all things true. She also calls him ‘weasel’ and ‘ape’. Slinking off to war then appears as a form of evasive action, as cringing as it is brave. In Henry IV, it is the women who speak the truth: ‘No, Sir ...”

“... being ultimately responsible for it, whether that’s designing GPUs or enabling the global Harry Potter industry. The Harry Potter film set lies between St Albans and Watford, a stop on the trail that begins with the selfie queue by J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station, just over the way from St ...”

“... through heavy clay to emerge in the shock of battle. The city shudders from the silent pounding of stone ordnance, the mute thunder of that lifesize howitzer by Charles Sergeant Jagger on the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Corner. Arranged on obelisks are squadrons of engineless planes that will never achieve flight. Granite battleships hide in ...”

“... cricketers, Bob Cherry and Tom Merry (Simon Raven’s favourite), and the manly, righteous Harry Wharton. On the darker side, smoking and slacking behind the fives court, were the bad boys, ugly and envious – Darcy, the chinless wonder, Bunter, the gross and hideous glutton, Vernon-Smith, the rich but vulgar bounder, Skinner and Stott, the loathsome ...”

“... established names, among them Frank Conroy, Stuart Dybeck, Richard Ford, Joyce Carol Oates, Robert Stone and Amy Tan. Those writers known partly for formal experimentation whose work Wolff did include (among them Lorrie Moore, Denis Johnson and Mary Robison) did not, in the stories Wolff selected, engage with the question of how a story convinces us of its ...”