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“... having been not-quite-obviously-Scottish-enough; he had the cheek to live somewhere else. Andrew Young, Edwin Muir, and several others, have been treated to petty discriminations of a similar kind.’ I suspect that Dunn himself is among those ‘several others’. Graham, it seems, was a drunk; and not a convivial drunk, but sour and contumacious. And he ...”

“... shouldn’t have been like this.’Many newspapers in the UK ran a picture of a smiling young white woman on their front pages last week. It’s rare for missing persons to make the front page, even if they’re children, and indeed the woman was no longer missing when her picture appeared on the homepage of the BBC and the cover of the Times, the ...”

“... caught in the passage in Maiden Voyage where a Chinese antique-dealer, complimenting the young Welch as a ‘handsome youth’, gives him a Ming blue-and-white artist’s brush pot. I flushed with pleasure and embarrassment as the dealer passed the brush pot to me. Before he put it in my hands he caressed it with a show of love; then he smacked his ...”

“... of a popular and oppositional British film culture. Indeed, its cast of gays, blacks and young characters made it seem a product of a hypothetical GLC film unit. Small wonder that Norman Stone bemoaned ‘the overall feeling of disgust and decay’ conveyed by the film and complained that Kureishi was inciting a ‘sleazy, sick hedonism’. Audiences ...”

“... the Uganda of General Amin, portrayed with increasing horror through the eyes of a naive young Scottish doctor. He evidently remembers Uganda very well (as I can vouch, having lived there a little earlier) and, in his second novel, it is obvious that he also knows Natal. Ladysmith tells of the 118-day siege of the British garrison town, the ...”

“... and ‘unimportant’ people who were the victims of her actions. The children and young men of the Mandela United Football Club, which she ran, hardly ever played football, but served as her bodyguards and vigilante enforcers, intimidated by her status and power. They were then caught in a legal spider’s web ‘through which the big flies ...”

“... never is; and it was decisively exploded in The Battle Lost and Won, where the focus shifts to the young soldier Simon Boulderstone and the superb evocation of his experience of the Alamein offensive – a rare achievement of informed imagination. It is then we realise that the real subject is the war. Not its causes, or its purpose, not primarily its horrors ...”

“... shift in their relations. The central action of the story, a menacing encounter with a group of young hunters, is but a dramatic reaffirmation of the looming threat, implied by his wife’s absence, to Mr Harrold’s way of life.What Carver does choose to present he depicts with a clarity born of a devotion to accuracy. Ezra Pound’s dictum, ‘Fundamental ...”

“... wickedness were felt in lands where the name of Prussia was unknown; and in order that he might rob a neighbour whom he had promised to defend, black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.’ ‘Evil’? ‘Wickedness’? The ability to employ these terms without awkwardness or ...”

“... from London regrets the decay of the relative clause in the speech and writing of the young. Songs punctuate the news to unpremeditated effect: Frank Sinatra, Petula Clark, Victoria de los Angeles, and, one morning, Yves Montand singing the favourite song of the Italian Communist partisans. It is difficult to exclude the external world if you ...”

“... from middle age onwards his own style of old devilry. The bad temper, the dislike of the young, the inflexibility, the walking sticks, what Jane Miller, in her beguiling series of meditations on being old in life and in literature, calls the ‘theatrical props’ of later life, enabled Amis to achieve old age before it could be thrust upon ...”

“... drives a hundred miles a day to teach at three different campuses. ‘It’s not like I want to rob a bank. What else can I do with a PhD in English?’ Inability to come up with answers to that question, or even to take it seriously, was at the heart of many earnest discussions of the job crisis at the MLA. Faced with the moral dilemma of training ...”

“... father has a heart attack, not before offering Jamal his wristwatch (he thinks they have come to rob him). It’s possible to see in these materials the making of an absorbing and affecting story about an idyllic young love that goes very wrong. But the elements ought to be carefully developed in a narrative that unfolds ...”

“... Harold Macmillan reversed the normal progression. Few young men are pompous; that comes later. Pomposity overtook Macmillan when he was still young; long before he was old he had shed all traces of it. The young are seldom boring; as a young man Harold Macmillan was a bore, and in time he became supremely entertaining ...”

“... for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing beside tombs or seated in Gothic cloisters. Most are dressed in the style of 1280, but some in that of 1820, and there are numerous attractive young nuns in timeless habits. Hill illustrates a painting ...”