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“... have recently provided the material for works by artists as different from each other as P.D. James, DV8 Physical Dance Theatre and David Lynch. Stephen Egger, an American academic and former policeman who wrote the first doctoral dissertation on the phenomenon, gives a definition/description of serial murder in Serial Murder: An Elusive Phenomenon: A ...”

“... about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to ...”

“... this sort of browned-off tone does for a good deal of the verse in Bell’s Complete Poems. Peter Porter writes that Bell ‘knew more about poetry than any other writer I have known’, yet the number of Bell’s best poems is small. Clearly he was multi-talented. A stanza from a version of Corbiere shows fine use of form and acoustics. Bell can also ...”

“... and Morrison published in Contemporary British Poetry: Douglas Dunn, Anne Stevenson, Craig Raine, James Fenton, Andrew Motion, Derek Mahon, Fleur Adcock, Carol Rumens, Medbh McGuckian, Penelope Shuttle and others. Geoffrey Hill, Dannie Abse, Denise Levertov, Peter Red-grove, U.A. Fanthorpe, Gillian Clarke, Eiléan Ní ...”

“... those which describe Thackeray conversing in his fiction with fellow novelists like Bulwer, G.P.R. James, Disraeli and Mrs Gore. Ray sees Thackeray in Vanity Fair as creating a work ‘quite as revolutionary as Ulyssess’ in its contradictions and subversions of popular fiction of the 1840s. Judging by his occasional mangling of titles (Charles Lever’s ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... on me, I set to work. When Hanson left Birmingham, Tara Prem inherited the project. She and Pedr James, the script editor, made numerous suggestions for improvement and the play’s final shape owes a lot to them. My intention was to take a television cliché – a kind of family reunion, a dinner party – and to transform it by degrees and by logical ...”

“... Another recent biography of a leading modern artist was composed under similar restrictions. Peter Ackroyd says he was ‘forbidden by the Eliot estate to quote from Eliot’s published work, except for purposes of fair comment in a critical context, or to quote from Eliot’s unpublished work or correspondence’. As it happens, the two subjects, while ...”

“... Crazy Golden Slippers, a bunch of lacquered shoe drawings, where each shoe was called Mae West or James Dean or Elvis Presley or Julie Andrews. As a strictly commercial artist Warhol not only knew how to make things pretty: he had the knack – the New Yorker-ish knack – of making style a matter of poise and clarity and simplicity and self-concealment. He ...”

“... of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by Eisenhower to become his chief of Intelligence; and ...”

“... to express both the attraction and the repulsion awakened in him by Nazism and Hitler. To turn to Peter Longerich’s Hitler: A Life, superbly translated by Jeremy Noakes and Lesley Sharpe, is to re-encounter the sober, appraising diction that Knausgaard deplores in Kershaw’s writing. Longerich is in no doubt that his subject was emotionally ...”

“... Chamberlains, who live in Washington Square West, are recent transplants from New York City. Peter, a fortysomething local news anchor and Alix, a 33-year-old writer and Instagram influencer, are parents to Catherine, a newborn, and Briar, an inquisitive three-year-old. Their mother pretends she is still living in NYC, a trick maintained by means of ...”

“... advised along those lines by his national defence procurement officer, an old friend called Peter Levene whom Heseltine had promoted to high office, in controversial circumstances, at a starting salary of £95,000 a year. Levene had been chairman of United Scientific Holdings, whose recent success had been based to a large degree on the cooperation of ...”

“... have to be particularly hideous. It is impossible to give a full list, but among those chosen were Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Alan Ross, Kenneth Tynan and Charles Addams, as well as a lot of extras with names like Old B., the Bastard and Chuff. She did not waste her time with intellectuals, but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has ...”

“... go through these doors in a weekend, many may dimly remember that it was the owner of this club, James Palumbo, who gave a car, a Rover, to Peter Mandelson MP, to help the cause. It is here, at the suitably messianic Ministry of Sound, that the Use Your Vote campaign is organised. Much of the music inside will come from ...”