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“... until the culprit has been run to earth belongs chiefly to the realms of fiction. Even where the chase starts from a fingerprint, the identification of its owner provides no more than a hypothesis that has to be proved and may be able to be disproved. But the far more common source of hypotheses lies in a murky region far removed from admissible or even ...”

“... thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here shows that Chatterton’s relations with the book trade after he arrived in London were far busier and more profitable than is commonly supposed. In the early summer of 1770 he was networking at Tom’s and the ...”

“... Scottish words (‘stirabout’, ‘tawse’) come up against venerable poeticisms (‘the bosky chase’) and Sloaney exclamations (‘O such an awful nook!’). There are hints of American (‘palooka’, ‘hellions’), while anti-French touches of humour turn the devils into ‘seigneurs’ and the divisions within the eighth circle, bolgie, into ...”

“... in New York begin to close. White pictures the heterosexual as hesitant and slow, all prelude and chase, while the homosexual cannot ‘risk feigning rejection. Everyone had to be unambiguous, as glowing as a peacock’s tail and as towering as a stag’s antlers, secondary sexual characteristics evolved on the principle that more is more.’ ‘Sex is an ...”

“... not a bonhomous Hrabal), and the contradictory economics of the joker – the cut-to-the-chase of the set-up, the delay of digressiveness – have stayed with him. You slow down from time to time, but always on his terms; generally, the pace is brisk. As in a joke, the plot either generates or stands in for everything ...”

“... energy; the uncertainty that a moment before said fear now says who cares. The rhythm becomes a chase after pleasure; the chase is caught and let loose for the pleasure of chasing it down again. With every chorus Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel lift their voices and then abandon them, stranding their words right at the edge ...”

“... kitsch but he also does politics: The Rotters’ Club concerns itself with the Grunwick strike, Michael Edwardes and British Leyland, and the Birmingham pub bombing. Coe is only ever content with full context. His words can seem like a means to an end. They remind. They point things out. They are not themselves intended to impress. His prose is neat-o and ...”

“... that the average historian would be doing things this or that way, whereas he will just cut to the chase. All the while, of course, Sidebottom the historian understands source criticism perfectly well and deploys the historian’s tools of inference and analogy to draw the invisible lines that connect glimpses from a vanished past. The disavowal of his own ...”

“... perceptual material relates to such stratagems. Painters (well, some kinds of painters) must, as Michael Baxandall puts it, ‘backtrack down the channels of perception, undoing the integration of features that is higher perception’s achievement, pushing right back down to the early visual modules of brightness, colour and the rest’. To be interested in ...”

“... a long flight to Jakarta. ‘Eric Lustbader?’ suggested Sean, and I shook my head. I’d seen Michael Herr sending dispatches. The hours flew by. The Beach is studded with non-cinematic references to popular culture of the same Eighties vintage: Atari and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on ...”

“... Every picture tells a story – even the illustrations on the covers of books. Michael Kater’s cover shows a rather shabby, cabbage-patch Hitler attending a harvest festival in 1936, receiving the salutes of a crowd in which the faces of adoring women are prominent. The image is both revealing and misleading. The peasant costumes certainly alert us to the affinities between Nazism and provincial kitsch, and Hitler’s studied geniality also reminds us of his extraordinary personal popularity, always much greater than that of the party as a whole or of its other leaders ...”

“... was accompanied by a widespread fascination with ‘Gypsies’ in popular culture. Klaus-Michael Bogdal, a professor of German literature at the University of Bielefeld at the time of the riots, was struck by the contradiction. In the early 1990s, Germans were taking up flamenco lessons. The French-Gitano band Gipsy Kings was hitting the top of the ...”

“... the reader (what is the main item here?), that disregards the conventional ‘cut to the chase’ grammar of looking which winnows as it sees, that is quite unafraid of the most outlandish qualifiers and similes, that continually proposes and interposes objects or scenes of probable symbolic worth (but are they?). The old man in ‘At the ...”

“... years ago, it seemed almost disappointingly ‘realistic’ after the wonderland of The Wild Goose Chase, where Warner had used Kafka’s technique for brilliant political satire, rather than for spiritual questioning: it was a world of mad, laughing policemen and football matches between Left and Right fixed for the latter’s benefit. But in The Aerodrome ...”

“... through. In one of my ration I found the baptism, on 14 December 1640, of Eaffry Johnson at St Michael’s in Harbledown, a village half a mile outside Canterbury towards which I sometimes feel the fates nudging me, since I had already visited it in the course of Michael Levey’s research for his biography of Walter ...”