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“... affairs; it was a massive misjudgment in his own area of expertise that brought him down. Although Richard Lamb says that ‘Eden’s premiership foundered solely because of the Suez affair’ (which begs the question, much discussed at the time in the press, of whether it would not otherwise have soon foundered on something else), his book deals with the ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career. He had published a ‘promising’ collection of stories, Blue Autumn, and had then started on a novel which he never finished ...”

“... to the joy of seeing the teacher in the grocery store, with no more authority than anyone else. Richard Price wrote the scene for his novel Clockers, and reused it in an episode of the television show The Wire. It’s fine as written, but better on TV, with everything expressed by the quiet way one of the dealers asks, ‘Y’all go to the movies?’ and ...”

“... outlines, to an extreme position that is the essence of the dance step. Much of the catalogue by Richard Kendall (who also produced an excellent catalogue for the 1996 exhibition Degas: Beyond Impressionism) and Jill DeVonyar is about making images of things that happened too fast to be recorded by the most attentive eye or quickest hand. But the exhibition ...”

“... he listed. It was something so all-pervasive in his work, both the essays and the fiction, that he may not have even noticed it, although he was alert to his strange relationship to tradition. He used and adapted the tone of the great masters of English eloquence: Bacon, Sir Thomas Browne, Hazlitt, Emerson and Henry James. He brought, he wrote, ‘a special ...”

“... emerges clearly from Michael Kurtz’s biography which appears in an excellent translation by Richard Toop. Kurtz records meticulously the genesis of all KS’s works to date and gives details of his global concert-giving activity. We may not be as aware of this in the UK now as we were twenty years ago. But he still ...”

“... fucked-up teenager who despised everything she and her chip-off-the-old-block, conformist, Cliff-Richard-adoring teenage daughter smugly stood for. I do see how awful it was for her, but I hate her, still and nevertheless.She was more or less out of my life by 1962, but the ‘ordinary provincial English housewife’ pattern, which I hadn’t come across ...”

“... when you begin to look at them properly that they seem stranded, shipwrecked by history. ‘Age may not weary them,’ Geoff Dyer has written of the army of bronze soldiers on permanent guard at First World War memorials, ‘but … powerless to protect themselves, their only defence, like that of the blind, is our respect.’ Putting aside, for a ...”

“... ghost stories are aware that they are being addressed by a man of much recondite learning, but it may not be apparent that the author is treating them to the recreations of one of the most learned men European scholarship has ever known. Even modern practitioners in one of James’s specialities will only be vaguely aware of his eminence in others, and an ...”

“... eat them, at which moment they are both tasted and smelled, via the back of the mouth? The answer may be partly psychological. Psychology does not seem to be McGee’s strong point: ‘If we eat half as many calories [by eating fructose instead of sucrose], we simply get hungry earlier’ begs a lot of questions. He will probably come up with more answers in ...”

“... Who could have invented Eisenhower, he asked, and no sooner had he invented a caricature of Richard Nixon in Our Gang than Nixon turned out to be caricaturing himself in the same way, locker-room slang and all. ‘No a man’s character isn’t his fate,’ Roth writes in Operation Shylock: ‘a man’s fate is the joke that his life plays on his ...”

“... of white racism was already on its way to becoming gospel. But Turnbull called it as he saw it; he may have been wrong, he was certainly subjective, judgmental and naive. His personal life (as we say) added to the myth of the handsome, charming hero. He was born in 1924, the child of a distant Scottish father and an eccentric Irish mother, who, despite being ...”

“... Hits Iceberg’, the balloon is still an object of inexhaustible rhetorical possibility. As Richard Holmes observes early in Falling Upwards, ‘all balloon flights are naturally three-act dramas’: the launch, the flight and the landing replicate the stages of every journey or human relationship – a set of parallels most recently and memorably ...”

“... explain the Earth’s structure and movement, and turned continental drift into plate tectonics. Richard Fortey witnessed some of the ferment first-hand while studying for a PhD in palaeontology at Cambridge, and in the 1980s, he used the distribution of trilobite fossils from half a billion years ago to work out the positions of some of the land masses ...”

“... held court alone, as Syberberg’s chilling cinematic portrait of her attests. Hitler and Richard Strauss, Toscanini and Houston Stewart Chamberlain came there, as well as a whole host of lesser figures, sycophants, geniuses, philosophers, charlatans, and professional Wagnerians of every stripe and calibre.One says all this about the bewildering ...”