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“... in the robber’s threatening note, and indeed looks back to the conversation John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson have in Pulp Fiction when a victim’s brains are blown out semi-accidentally. ‘You probably went over a bump,’ Jackson says, and the men’s main worry is how to clean up the car they are riding in. These are not trivial jokes, and they do ...”

“... exists within you.’The language of self-help sits curiously within an anti-racist discourse. Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help (1859), the first of its kind, presented a catalogue of men who had, through the application of tremendous energies, achieved what Smiles referred to as ‘a solid and enduring ...”

“... English as ‘smile’) figure prominently in the Paradiso. Beatrice is constantly wreathed in smiles, as the sinister saying goes. Christina Rossetti, in a note to one of her poems, complains that both Dante’s Beatrice and Petrarch’s Laura ‘have come down to us resplendent with charms, but … scant of attractiveness’. These ...”

“... known one thing about Anna Letitia Barbauld, which was her appearance in a droll anecdote told by Samuel Taylor Coleridge towards the end of his life and recorded in the posthumous volume of his Table Talk. ‘Mrs Barbauld told me that the only faults she found with the Ancient Mariner were – that it was improbable, and had no moral,’ Coleridge is ...”

“... least caution the boys, or get the Mayor to caution them from the bench.’ There must have been smiles at police headquarters and they seem to have settled for a constable speaking to the boys. Domestic – more or less – notes include arrangements for little trips with Miss Dugdale, that friend of liberty Edward Clodd appropriately providing a ...”

“... and championed’ – though in fact almost every reference to Goldsmith in the Life of Samuel Johnson itself belittles him. Boswell was not alone. After Goldsmith’s death in 1774 stories of his ‘absurdities’ multiplied: he was ‘little Goldy’, Dr Minor to Johnson’s Dr Major, the Sancho Panza of English literature, ‘an idiot in the ways ...”

“... and blameless views, he has never lost the temperament and outlook of a prima donna. He still smiles the same ingratiating smile, peddles the same innocuous platitudes.’ According to the traditional view, Eden was a fine Foreign Secretary but a weak and disastrous prime minister who, taunted with weakness by his own backbenchers, tried to be tough and ...”

“... from the Lord. And Carter ‘Doc’ McCoy of The Getaway uses his face like currency, swapping smiles for confidences while plotting the murders of his business associates, or negotiating the sale of his girlfriend, Carol, to cannibals. Like the long and short-con operators of The Grifters, ‘agreeability’ is ‘a stock in trade’. It’s not who you ...”

“... lions, cows, goats); landscapes, views and ruins; and, most strikingly, pieces of the human body. Samuel Pepys, a century before, would have called these ‘brave cutts’. Page after page displays eyes, chins, mouths (grinning, aghast, pursed), ears, hands and feet, each part excised from the whole to float in a manner both exemplary and forlorn. This is the ...”

“... most part on the fringes of the theatrical world, dreaming of becoming the next Sean O’Casey or Samuel Beckett. Ann Sevitt’s engagement to Tom O’Brien produced strains within the family, but were as nothing compared to the firestorm generated by Celia’s engagement to Jim Prendergast. Celia persuaded Elizabeth to throw an engagement party at the ...”

“... in fact, a secret fellow-traveller – a fact that, had it been widely known, might have wiped the smiles off the faces of his London audiences. The United Irishmen were Enlightenment anti-colonialists, not Romantic nationalists, but the rise of Romantic nationalism in the early 19th century once more brought culture to the centre of political ...”

“... and youthful Jollity,/Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,/Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles.’ The rough and tumble of Bunyan’s monosyllables has the buzzing intimacy of direct speech, as in this passage from The Pilgrim’s Progress: CHRISTIAN: Just there, said Christian, did I sit down to rest me; but being overcome with sleep I there lost ...”

“... within the bounds of those that would be indulged in by rational businessmen.’ Over at MGM, Samuel Goldwyn had made his own calculations, telling Ivor Montagu, who collaborated with Eisenstein on his Hollywood scripts, to ‘please tell Mr Eisenstein that I have seen his film Potemkin and admire it very much. What we should like would be for him to do ...”

“... it’s the custom in this country to acknowledge gifts.’ In prose, he is crisp but not boffo; he smiles but rarely twinkles. Occasionally his swiftness of mind shines through the literate badinage. About seeing his good friend Jean Howard: ‘She is up to no good but I couldn’t find out which gender of “no-good” it was.’ Porter, who wrote so well for ...”

“... poor Lord Byron’s PAGE. The ‘steady indignation’ has presumably abated, and the adult woman smiles at the little girl’s transvestite ambitions; elsewhere she, too, can object to ‘a woman of the masculine gender’. But no anxiety about the proper spheres of the sexes, no consideration even of the value of good needlework as against bad art, can be ...”