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“... A rich​ old American in John Banville’s new novel makes an amused distinction between money and small change. Asked what money is, he just laughs. This is not malevolent laughter but he does do a dangerous thing with his money. He leaves a lot of it, when he dies, to a young American niece. She is grateful, of course, and the money enhances her freedom – at first ...”

“... port, Chilean wine and so forth. One of the number could never get enough of the joke. This was John Braine, whose special party-trick was the skipping of ironic bits. When he said that England these days was run by the trade unions and the pansies, he meant it. When he went on about treason and the intellectuals there was grim, literal relish in his ...”

“... work or even to lead his readers through a particular poem. Valéry, Allen Tate, William Empson, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and Robert Lowell were instructive in that way. But it is rare for a poet to lead readers through a poem, draft by draft, or explain how he settled for one word rather than another. Yeats did not offer to explain how he got ...”

“... New York journal on 18 February. This was not a new sentiment in the United States. In 1823 John Quincy Adams had suggested that ‘there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation,’ so all New World Newtons ought to know what to do: if an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ...”

“... English acquaintance have written brief, anecdotal accounts based on their memories of him – John St John’s To the War with Waugh has 56 pages, Frances Donaldson’s Portrait of a Country Neighbour 118, while those collected in Evelyn Waugh and his World are naturally shorter still. It is true that Alec Waugh ...”

“... of their son, George III. After 1760, Augusta spent more than £30,000 on Kew, and gave Capability Brown permission to level her mother-in-law’s follies. The Dowager Princess then employed William Chambers to build her own: a remarkable range of buildings, including a mosque, a gothic cathedral, an alhambra and the Pagoda, which is the finest survival of ...”

“... side on the podium translating his words as he speaks, rubs shoulders with Jerzy Kosinski, John Lennon and Arthur Cohen.) The cast of other characters is often barely credible, a hint perhaps that there is invention and embellishment in the seeming straight-talk: Casey and Teddy, ‘a couple of clowns from the days of vaudeville and silent ...”

“... in their requirements, to survive our wholesale transformation of their environment. The Brown Satyr butterfly, endemic to San Francisco, where I live, became extinct sometime in the 19th century, and the Xerxes Blue vanished during World War Two when its Golden Gate habitat was overtaken by military expansion. A number of other local species – the ...”

“... two men, or rather this boy and this man, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy and Jack Levy, are at the centre of John Updike’s new novel. There can’t be many readers who will begin Terrorist without wondering what Updike – white, Protestant, 74 – thinks he is doing, presuming to be able to inhabit the consciousness of a teenage Arab-American Muslim. Michiko ...”

“... carried off the Mao Dun Prize for Literature in 2008, a little like the Man Booker going to Dan Brown. Mai Jia is a genre novelist, whose books have sold several million copies in China, and an assiduous self-publicist. When Mai Jia’s publisher told the press he would pay an advance of ten million yuan for his new novel, Whisper of the Wind, Mai Jia ...”

“... faltering, what warmth, suppleness … like a squirrel among buck hares – a red squirrel among brown nuts.’ Later, when her attachment to Vita was long over, Virginia confided to the composer Ethel Smyth that she ‘didn’t take to Trefusis’. What precisely she didn’t take to was Tandem, a novel that strays haphazardly into the future. Despite many ...”

“... Obama’s promise to withdraw ‘one to two’ combat brigades a month for 16 months. Suddenly, John McCain’s belief that US troops should stay until some undefined victory looked impractical and out of date. The Iraqi government seemed almost surprised by its own decisiveness. It is by no means as confident as it pretends to be that it can survive ...”

“... determining provision and consumption,’ had to be modified to meet the objections of people like John Smith. A pillar of the old Right of the Party, a man still rooted in its traditions, Smith didn’t feel that Labour had to start all over again. Kinnock became increasingly irritated with people who resisted the Party’s modernisation, whether they came ...”

“... that an African American would be incarcerated at some point in their lifetime had doubled since Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation; and more black adults were under the control of the criminal justice system – whether in prison, on probation or on parole – than were enslaved in 1850. Once again, it ...”

“... Even incidentally, there’s a broad, unlikely set of references to literature – to Saki and John Fowles and Gatsby’s ‘old sport’. In more detail, a character called Clem Snide does a Sam Spade impression and spends his days checking into Hiltons on a headless-body murder investigation. The case involves drugs, black magic and an Egyptian sunset ...”