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“... childhood during which his primary obsessions were cartooning, pulp fiction and the movies. At Brown University he became editor of the humorous magazine, the Brown Jug, and met Nathan Weinstein, who later changed his name to Nathanael West; Sid himself had originally been named Simeon. That Weinstein or West ended up a ...”

“... and bad scripts are bailed out by sonorous soundtracks. Films – the Helfgott biopic or Jane Campion’s truly abysmal The Piano – acquire gravitas by replacing all shades of grey with the stern black and white of the keys. Normally it’s just a cop-out, borrowing the sonorous qualities of one art-form to make up for the artistic failings of ...”

“... the world’ within wider urban design. For their part, civic activists and urban thinkers such as Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans saw those ‘leftovers’ in strong social and economic terms. The oil crisis shook the ‘obsolescence paradigm’ of unlimited growth and consumption to the core; adaptive reuse and sustainability entered the equation, challenging ...”

“... culture of science was a more obvious target for the sour provincialism of F.R. Leavis. Andrew Brown’s J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science is better at satisfying biographical than historical curiosity. It is not the first book based on the Bernal Archive, now in the Cambridge University Library, but it gives us more of the facts than all its ...”

“... Vorse, Mary Stewart Cutting, John Kendrick Bangs, Edith Wyatt, Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Alice Brown and Henry Van Dyke (‘the friend of the family’). Apart from arranging for the girl to have met her fiancé at college, so that the gentleman in question remains a promising mystery to her relatives, Howells did little in his chapter to advance the ...”

“... across the sea-loch with its stealthy, dipping flight and the ride fills nearly full, buoying the brown tangles of the seaweed, I can see time pouring in a transparent flux, across the sounds and the uplands, bearing the people away to America, lifting the houses like flotsam and dropping them near a different ferry-port, a different plot of land. Only it ...”

“... are luxury editions, befitting the occasion, and reprints of the novels and of the manuscript of Jane Eyre, updated selections of the letters, non-updated editions of Charlotte’s and Emily’s poetry, books about the novels (scholarly and not), books of essays, books about their belongings, about the parsonage and Haworth, comic books, volumes of artwork ...”

“... I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody shell, enclosed in deeply and irregularly lobed involucre, nuts solitary or in clusters.’ I like the Joycean pedantry of that word for husk, ‘involucre’. Hazel is the tree of knowledge, ‘noble of the wood’, its Irish vernacular name is ...”

“... by J.H. Maguire; right, Oscar Wilde photographed in New York in 1882. William Wilde married Jane Elgee, a translator and poet, in 1851. She wrote for the radical, nationalist journal the Nation, and was also the true author of a fiery editorial – a revolutionary poem in prose – that had appeared in the paper in 1848. Isaac Butt, the lawyer defending ...”

“... schoolwork. They would, for example, almost certainly have a working idea of Bath, perhaps from Jane Austen. Tillyard supplies a four-page passage which starts: ‘At the beginning of the 18th century Bath was still a small town largely dependent on a moribund wool industry. But it had two natural resources’ and goes on to explain about Beau Nash, the ...”

“... would, if asked, tell us many little particulars about the subsequent career of her people,’ Jane Austen’s nephew wrote in his Memoir of his aunt. In this traditionary way we learned that Miss Steele never succeeded in catching the Doctor; that Kitty Bennet was satisfactorily married to a clergyman near Pemberley, while Mary obtained nothing higher ...”

“... know: let’s find our angriest, shoutiest, most tribal, most aggressive party loyalist. As Craig Brown joked in the Mail on Sunday, it is as if, instead of turning to Doctor Watson for advice, Sherlock Holmes had instead consulted the Hound of the Baskervilles. Campbell is a political journalist who, as part of a not-all-that-complex self-loathing, despises ...”

“... today often takes the form of a commentary on obsession – most lately food obsession as in Jane Barry’s Hungry and Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. Jane Austen enjoys mentioning ‘fried beef’ and refers to green peas – themselves a late arrival and gobbled as a novelty by the Sun King and by Queen Anne on our ...”

“... Dominic Cummings – is relegated to a minor role as an anonymous ‘weirdo’ hireling. Verity Jane, in Gibson’s new novel, Agency (Jane is her surname, as in Jane’s Fighting Ships), is the same sort of age (33) as Cayce and has the same sort of niche job: she is an ‘app ...”

“... on one of his walking tours, in a remote idyllic valley in north Wales – a parson’s daughter, Jane Gryffydh, ‘the most innocent, the most amiable, the most beautiful girl in existence’. He hadn’t seen or contacted her for eight years, but now he proposed that she become his wife, although by this time Jane was ...”