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“... beneath which the Malverns piled up intensely blue. A cornelian glow illumined the heavy summer green. The strange creature at hand seemed more ghastly, stained by this sweet tint. Something about its headlong purpose recalled Picasso. It was eminently bovine and yet scarcely male. Surely this must be the cow of Guernica’s bull. It seemed as mystical and ...”

“... Henry de Mille, was an Episcopal minister who became a playwright, one of the theatre producer David Belasco’s first collaborators. He discouraged his sons William and Cecil from going into the theatre but they didn’t listen. William de Mille, Agnes’s father, became a successful New York playwright, known for dramas with a social conscience; Cecil ...”

“... paper. John was the deputy editor, John Gross was the editor. Gross referred to John as the ‘sea-green incorruptible’ and you get the picture; it wasn’t a happy place to work in those days, though the friction between the two principals – the severity of one and the worldliness of the other – worked to the benefit of the paper. John was definitely ...”

“... but now he met the youngest, 15-year-old Noel – he helped her pick up the fragments of the small green coffee cup she’d dropped. He would spend the next two years hatching schemes that would allow them to meet, most of them thwarted, by the fact that she was still at Bedales, by her protective older sisters, or by Noel herself, who held him at arm’s ...”

“... and backs of bystanders. At the north end, near the traditionally less tolerant area of Bethnal Green, National Front members sold their papers on market days and congregated at a pub in Cheshire Street. Soon Bengali schoolchildren were being allowed out of school early, their mothers walking to work in numbers for fear of being ambushed or pelted, and ...”

“... such as food stamps and prescription drugs for the elderly, will no longer be eligible for green cards. It is estimated that this may affect twenty million poor children, 90 per cent of whom are US citizens. Moreover, the 447 pages of regulations (‘Inadmissibility on Public Charge Grounds’) are so deliberately complicated that they will undoubtedly ...”

“... but a Tory government nor by the sound of it ever wants to. At Birmingham I have a session with David Edgar’s playwrights’ class, then do another ‘Our Alan’ performance for a more general audience. 26 January. Run into Tristram Powell. Andrew Devonshire (sic) has done a diary for the Spectator mentioning the memoir of Julian Jebb (edited by ...”

“... it once more. But he found himself drawn to the supposedly obsolete social liberalism of T.H. Green, which he associated with Ruskinian political radicalism in its idealisation of active ‘citizenship’ within a comprehensively caring State, and he had the nerve to suspect that there was more life in the old Idealist corpse than in all its ...”

“... that there would be more than a frank exchange of ideas when Mailer head-butted Vidal in the green room and Vidal punched him in the stomach. It was rumoured at the time that Vidal had recently had a facelift which Mailer’s head-conk threatened to undo. Lesser men would have fled, but as Vidal is fond of saying, there are two things to which one always ...”

“... I was ushered in to Colonel Klindt’s office. ‘I have come to request a visit to my husband, David Kitson,’ I said. ‘No visits for Kitson.’ He did not even look up. ‘Look –’ ‘It’s no good being difficult, lady,’ he said. ‘No visits for Kitson and that’s it. If you want to apply again tomorrow, well, that’s your affair. You can ...”

“... to the Bard in Westminster Abbey as a way of advertising their superior patriotism. The actor David Garrick also used the Bard to inflate and dignify his own career, puffing him as the nation’s number-one playwright – just like Lawrence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh would go on to do – as a means of representing himself as its number-one actor. He had ...”

“... treatment,’ James Callaghan stated as home secretary, going on to declare that, enhanced by open green spaces and communal living units as well as new medical and psychiatric facilities, Holloway would become ‘basically a secure hospital’ at the ‘hub of the female penal system’. The reconstruction took place with the prison inmates in situ at a cost ...”

“... up, is workmanlike. There are nice bits, though. Even near the most troubled estates, there is green stuff. Even near Chickenley, where the 12-year-old girl tried to hang a five-year-old boy in a patch of woods. Many people in Dewsbury think the media overdid it. ‘The press wanted to make it another James Bulger,’ a police officer tells me. The CPS ...”

“... their stocks of ideas too rapidly. ‘Our problem is that we never wanted to repeat,’ says David Thomas, singer with the early American post-punk group Pere Ubu. ‘That desire … became as much of a trap as trying to repeat formulas the way some bands do.’ Yet Reynolds is too busy working through all his overlapping band biographies to pursue this ...”

“... and he would return to the displacement over and over (and over) in his fiction. Here are the boy David Kern’s parents, George and Elsie, fighting about it in the early story ‘Pigeon Feathers’: Mother’s anger touched David’s face; his cheeks burned guiltily. Just by staying in the living room he associated ...”