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“... when our ship failed to come in, claim we had hated all along. Ellis provided them, and so did Jay McInerney, Tama Janowitz and others: these were writers who shared a sensibility and social milieu; they came to be identified with the same unsavoury behaviour of their characters. They were declared spokespeople for a generation that, once the initial ...”

“... by means of maps and surveys; he is master of the Melville Log, the documentary project begun by Jay Leyda in 1956 and now continued by Parker in electronic (and indefinitely expanding) form. Volume II of the biography, especially, is enlivened by cantankerous outbursts against long-dead Melvilles who failed to preserve letters, or librarians who neglected ...”

“... In the USSR, things had been very different: when Eisenstein restaged the storming of the Winter Palace for October, he had been allowed to close off parts of the city for hours at a time, and to deploy 8000 volunteers, many of them workers and soldiers who had taken part in the real thing; for Potemkin, he was given the use of the Black Sea Fleet for ...”

“... shadows and flattening a creature’s appearance. As various commentators, including Stephen Jay Gould, have confirmed, Thayer’s theory of countershading – illustrated in DPM with images of light-bellied jet planes as well as sharks – proved that artists could bring genuine insight to this field. Thayer greatly overstated his case, however. Animal ...”

“... degree of suppressed hilarity: ‘You must eat orrrranges,’ when a student went down with a winter sniffle. ‘You must read Marianne Weber, then you will understand the trrragedy’ – to a student who claimed not to see the point of Max.‘Andrew, with your Kant worrrrk’, ‘Sara, your labours with Krrristeva’, ‘Tony, with your worrrk on ...”

“... columnist called Sheilah Graham, who had, he said, the look of ‘a young Zelda’. The creator of Jay Gatsby wasn’t slow to see through her persona. Sheilah Graham was actually Lily Shiel, the youngest child of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, who had grown up in a Stepney Green slum. Fitzgerald took it on himself to remedy her lack of an education. When she ...”

“... technique,’ Saxton confided as he held a full syringe ‘between his squinting eye and the late winter sun’. Neugass overcame his dismay and joked in his diary that many resuscitated volunteers were by now ‘full-blooded Spaniards’. Thirty-five thousand volunteers from 53 countries took up the call of the Comintern and another four or five thousand ...”

“... to be the effortless maestro of the scene. He has willed himself into being. Gatsby is actually Jay Gatz, a poor boy from the plains, in romantic pursuit of Daisy Buchanan, the upper-class object of his desire, who once rejected him. He believes he can win her back through displays of wealth and manners, but she is now married to Tom Buchanan, an ...”