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“... than a numbered bus route: ‘the 88 bus passes by noisily’; ‘the 214 bus from Pratt Street to Old Street’. In Sterling Karat Gold, the Goldsmiths Prize winning novel of 2021, Isabel Waidner showed a shrewd sense of how to balance registers. In the world of the book there are small mutant creatures ...”

“... 500’, which seems to mean MI5), and the hero is no sooner posted to 10 Downing Street than a grenade comes through the front door. The material is that of any hard-core thriller, and very unsympathetic it is, cold-hearted in its violence and cynical about loyalty or affection. Most modern thrillers not only use this material but show a ...”

“... talkativeness – which meant it was never taken up as a music station, even in Oxford Street. But it also failed because, unusually, Branson failed to identify his niche audience: Virgin Radio did not consistently target a single age-group, but got lost somewhere between Led Zeppelin and Coolio. Branson is at his best applying imaginative touches ...”

“... reticent, seldom interviewed. His interests are not those of the public that has kept Coronation Street so high in the ratings for nearly twenty-five years. He owns a Bonnard, a Gauguin, several Modiglianis and a Utrillo and was one of the first collectors in this country to admire Paul Klee. He has a taste for ballet, for the plays of ...”

“... the Grand Duchess which can also be disrespectfully called the Fortnum-and-Mason, or the Bond Street, or the Ritzy Style, unless those places have all been taken over by Lord Forte within the last couple of weeks, or, of all her styles that one which I feel she held most close to her heart, and which, again disrespectfully, I call the Bowen 707 or the ...”

“... in favour of other social ‘spaces’: women, peasants, the empire and ‘the politics of the street’. To understand the current scholarly consensus on the Russian Revolution, we need to look back at some of the old controversies, notably the one about inevitability. For Steinberg, this isn’t a problem, as his contemporary worm’s-eye view ensures ...”

“... He wrote to his aunt Josephine to find out the precise height of the railings outside 7 Eccles Street so he could describe Bloom breaking into his own house. When it came to transgressive acts of mock-heroic blatherskiting, however, any old house would do (lash it out there, lads). Sometimes, it feels as though commentators fetishise Joyce’s ...”

“... religious or civic leaders. The rows about the past are replicated at local level: Councillor Sean McGlinchey, who served 18 years for his role in a car bombing in Coleraine in 1973 that killed six people, is now the Sinn Fein mayor of Limavady. In Cookstown, my town, a large wooden sign was nailed to a lamppost in Monrush, a Protestant housing ...”

“... they’re rife, in government and among journalists. ‘You couldn’t make this shit up,’ Sean Spicer, then Trump’s press secretary, told Wolff about life in Trump’s White House. In fact you wouldn’t have needed to make it up: everything you might reasonably have assumed to be true about Trump is confirmed by Wolff. As he would later ...”

“... the Irish-American imagination and too much to the good-for-nothings seen everyday around bars and street corners. As the man who had repudiated his slave name told us, ‘the Irish Americans object to the Irish coming into their bars, taking their girlfriends, taking their jobs, not working properly when they take the jobs. The older Irish don’t like their ...”

“... out to entertain with its depravity. It’s a pop chronicle of evil: the protagonist, a vile Wall Street broker named Patrick Bateman who inexplicably turns serial killer, is, it turns out, just your everyday fashion victim – Ellis’s version of the Nazi. Like the murderer nervously wiping away his fingerprints, Ellis engages in the meticulous erasure of ...”

“... average. ‘Growth’ has become similarly elusive: probably negative if we don’t count the high street and housing. Is a rise in GDP a good measurement, anyway? The quality of growth was a 1970s idea, worth resurrecting. German progress in solar power has brought the price of photo-voltaic cells tumbling and, by enabling houses to generate their own ...”

“... twenty-one years, a fine girl but a bleeder, and her young cousin husband her uncle Jack’s son Sean aged twenty-one years, a sterling fellow but a bleeder too … By attributing haemophilia to a woman (a footnote tells the reader that this condition is ‘an exclusively male disorder. But not in this work’), Beckett asserts the same authorial ...”

“... as the public mood changes. No honeymoon lasts for long. As the American political commentator Sean Trende likes to point out, if the Democrats could recover after being on the wrong side of the bloodiest civil war in history, parties can come back from just about anything. How bad would things have to get for Corbyn to stand a chance of winning a general ...”

“... in the Kremlin down to the ‘typical Russian lack of culture’ of the man in the street. On learning that Andrei lived in New York, they start asking about ‘the art galleries and restaurants they knew there, which I had never been to or even heard of’. It is a revelation: ‘So these were the Russian liberals who opposed the Putin ...”