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“... expects that the reader should see him. And here we are very much in the dark: not for nothing has Ian Jack, its meticulous editor, noted that ‘Wuthering Heights is one of the most enigmatic of English novels.’ Much depends on how Emily Brontë imagined her hero, as well as very skilfully creating him, and covering her authorial tracks. I would say ...”

“... confection, set in the not-too-distant-future, the wealthy and unscrupulous entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman imports and rebuilds all the major English tourist attractions on the Isle of Wight and opens up the island as a theme-park offering ‘Quality Leisure’ to wealthy American and Japanese tourists. Sir Jack, in the ...”

“... to be a disappointed Labour candidate for the Tory-held seat of Brent North, told the journalist Ian Jack that Gujarati are too preoccupied with caste rivalry and feuding to give any attention to wider issues. And there are certainly Gujarati so wrapped up in making money as to have little time for anything else. Yet most Gujarati are mindful of the ...”

“... to think there might be more effective, if well-tried, means of trying to regard the world afresh. Jack Flea’s Birthday Celebration was written in 1974, shortly after I had finished writing the last of the stories that were to make up my first collection, First Love, Last Rites, and I think of this play as really belonging in that volume. It was commissioned ...”

“... all because of our fucking surname,’ exclaimed the exasperated Valerie Hobson, the wife of Jack Profumo, when ‘the Profumo scandal’ was resurrected many years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his ...”

“... turn back to much-earlier conceived but relegated plans for a similar multi-volume edition, so Ian Jack tells us in the General Introduction to the first volume, which has just appeared, and is devoted to Pauline and Paracelsus. Meanwhile John Pettigrew’s own admirable edition in two volumes, completed and supplemented by Thomas Collins, and ...”

“... or detective-story end of the spectrum than he is to the relatively straightforward adventure (Ian Fleming, Geoffrey Household, Jack Higgins), in which the difficulties and dangers of the mission are more important than its secrets. He still needs to send his hero into danger, he still needs an active climax, but he has ...”

“... is a notably enlivening work: it rouses the reader both imaginatively and intellectually. Ian Cochrane’s new novella buttonholes you immediately with its easy Irish conversational style: Fergus Moore was new in the village. Well, he had been there for three months but nobody had got to know him. He came from the city. His Da had got one of the big ...”

“... cater for young men any more, unless they’re transvestites or slaves. Blokes under forty are all Jack-my-lads who think their pricks are bloody priceless.’ The types who went to her in Streatham all had one reason or another to feel out of the mainstream of sexual conduct. Even those who didn’t want a beating would probably not have had the cheek to turn ...”

“... For some years,​ I have nursed a modest hope concerning Ian McEwan: that one day he should write a novel without a catastrophic turning point, or a shattering final twist. That for once no one should be involved in a freak ballooning accident, or be brained by a glass table, or be wrongly convicted of a country-house rape; that no one should experience a marriage-ending bout of premature ejaculation, or have their child stolen in a supermarket, or suffer a terrifying home invasion at the hands of a thug with an easily diagnosed neurological condition ...”

“... ending for Dickens’s The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The latterday MacLean industry is touched on by Jack Webster in his biography of the novelist, who died in 1987. It seems the invitation to MacNeill to tackle the master’s outlines came from Collins on the strength of a manuscript of his own he had submitted to the firm. It was ‘a heaven-sent opportunity ...”

“... Jack Goody took early retirement from the prestigious post of William Wise Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and is now in a highly productive phase of his career. Indeed, if Cambridge University Press had not put many of his recent writings into a single series, it would be hard to keep track of all the things he has been up to ...”

“... came to be embellished by ‘a crop of country houses … largely on new sites’. This was not, Ian Nairn insisted, ‘at all typical of the pattern in the rest of England’. You can, to quote his near double Tony Hancock, say that again, Mush.Fifty years after Harris and a few years after the heyday of the Arts and Crafts movement, the battle of the ...”

“... could hear was the giggles and gasps. On my little TV, where the picture was jumpy at first, was Jack Kerouac. He was sitting up at a white piano, and Steve Allen tinkled away at the keys. Kerouac is very clean, very neat, but he looks nervous. Allen is smug. He’s a polyester-clad uncle sitting at the piano. ‘You nervous?’ says ...”

“... he was bigtime. If he saw a cowboy picture he was Alan Ladd until the next picture, then he was Jack Palance or Gary Cooper or whoever the hell. He decided he would never speak to anyone at the table again, not a word. He would be vicious about it. They’d had their chance. He sank back in his chair, mouth twisted tight, and willed on a black ...”