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“... to have had a touch of Robin Hood about him, Honan does not dismiss the venerable legend that the young Shakespeare used to poach deer on the estates of local aristocrats. But for the most part Shakespeare: A Life is colourful only where the record strictly warrants it. Colouring in the record is what this book does best. Honan’s particular flair is for the ...”

“... and about socialism as the rhetoric of the Labour Party. There was even a hasty attempt to redraw Michael Foot as a moderate, a nice old thing who had had a wild youth, a sheep in wolf’s clothing. This reappraisal, however grotesque, may in part have been motivated by a sudden desire to be analytical and reasonably truthful, after all the intoxicating ...”

“... occasion was a rehearsal of KS’s ensemble one afternoon in Cologne, in the course of which a young, vaguely familiar Californian strode in to say hullo. He turned out to be Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead. He had come over from Düsseldorf to invite the whole group onstage for the Dead’s concert that night. I was overjoyed, being something of a ...”

“... with asbestos had sentenced thousands of unsuspecting workers to death. Unlike so many other angry young journalists of the Sixties, Laurie Flynn has not lost his indignation, nor his determination to publicise the sins of negligent employers. For most of the Eighties he worked for Granada’s World in Action, one of the few redoubts of investigative ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... feeling, they wept. Then, last night, the final twist occurred. The tribe fell upon her assailant, Michael Heseltine, and slew him, too.’ But the mere exclusion of Heseltine from the leadership seemed insufficient atonement for the unnatural enormity of matricide. Within the Tory tribe there was to be no healing, no reconciliation, no closure. This was a ...”

“... athletic shoe industry, and the fashion industry as a whole, traffics in images. A Nike as depicts Michael Jordan as a corporate CEO who takes time in between games to inspect the shoes bearing his name. The figures of athletes and supermodels flash everywhere. ‘Because beauty has something to say,’ is how Esquire announced its Christy Turlington cover, as ...”

“... outfits finally revealed. Not only was Dr James Barry a woman but he had given birth to a child. Michael du Preez and Jeremy Dronfield’s Dr James Barry: A Woman ahead of Her Time is the product of exhaustive archival labours. Du Preez, a retired surgeon who has been on Barry’s trail for more than a decade, and Dronfield, a biographer and novelist, offer ...”

“... this speech after reading the opening chapters of a novel by the protagonist of What a Carve Up!, Michael Owen (not the footballer). Michael, the author of Accidents Will Happen and The Loving Touch, is too experienced to be more than mildly affronted when a student finds his work insufficiently radical, but if his books ...”

“... exercises in his own manner, or to have reverted to whatever commonplaces were popular when he was young. A good poet is someone who manages, in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms, to be struck by lightning five or six times; a dozen or two dozen times and he is great.’ This is poetry as catastrophe, as Minnesotan roulette. Heaney in his The ...”

“... Other European governments utter polite versions of the notion of good riddance, until the young and rebellious, all over Europe, instigate massive disruptions under the slogan Nous aussi, nous sommes ibériques. Meanwhile, in Spain and Portugal, the tourists have abandoned their cars and their belongings, the rich have taken their assets and ...”

“... nerve to continue killing, its eventual collapse was only a matter of time. From such beginnings a young Pole could only associate the imperium with its barbed wire. The fences which defined its boundaries also defined its essence, as Kapuściński first realised in the course of a trip on the Trans-Siberian in 1958. In the customs shed at the Sino-Soviet ...”

“... obtained the money which underpins his political career by disclosing a government secret when a young private secretary; and Mrs Cheveley tells Sir Robert that she will be in the gallery with his incriminating letter to ensure that he commends the rascally Argentine canal scheme to the House. In one way, that may not have been a thousand miles from the ...”

“... associated, interchangeable motifs. The stories themselves are of no great importance except for young Skidmore, whose world is steadily depopulated as the year goes by. The reader’s pleasures are other and various. One of them is the intertextual chase. Here, for instance, Stead simultaneously parodies Robbe-Grillet’s degree-zero text and, by putting ...”

“... national consensus; whatever their experience of individuals, it has gone to form the attitude of young black English men and women to being English and being black. This consensus also serves as guidance to officials on how they should behave, since they see themselves as charged with realising the general will. In particular, judges, magistrates, policemen ...”