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“... but I didn’t like the work. I could only read certain things which I’d read before, like the Billy Goat Gruff books, but they didn’t have them there. They had the Beacon Series. I said ‘I don’t know,’ then I started saying nothing. Every day my name was read out because I’d forgotten to hang something up. I ...”

“... American public’s attention, but he feared that the venture would fail and be rebranded with the name of a more popular writer: ‘best of all as the Edith Wharton!’ In 1902, when he made this prediction, James was hardly lacking in fame. And in the two years that followed he published The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. After his ...”

“... into his father’s shop, Select Cut, when he was nine. Iris was good friends with his father, Billy McCambley, a butcher with a drink problem (a fact that makes you fear for his fingers). Before Billy died of cancer in 2008 Iris promised she would look after his son, which she did, taking him for walks along the banks ...”

“... Members receive the Stobart Fleet Manual and Spotter Guide, which lists all the lorries by name, with a box to tick after a sighting. They can buy Eddie Stobart fleeces, teddy bears and boxer-shorts decorated with tiny trucks. There’s an Eddie Stobart tapestry, and Eddie Stobart tea ‘especially blended for express refreshment’. That’s a lot of ...”

“... makes long-distance phone-calls to men named Kafka, hoping to marry one of them and change her own name to Fran Kafka. And then there are the styles. The amphora-from-Cairo story displays comic-tradition Brooklyn speech:   ‘It’s an amphora! You don’t know what an amphora is? Dummy! It’s a clay pot! ... Run a needle right through here. Listen. Here ...”

“... rather not go. What is the source of this confidence? Perhaps it derives from the author’s name. It can’t be easy in the current climate of headbanging provincialism, rap scripts, scratch ’n’ sniff novellas, to have to answer to ‘Tim’. A moniker straight out of the nursery, a badge for a tame tiger. I’ve got nothing against ...”

“... Imagine a roll of barbed wire, but this big.’ Billy Albertina spreads his arms out, gesturing to a brick building near the entrance to the Cammell Laird shipyard in Birkenhead. In the summer of 1984, Albertina and his colleagues occupied a half-built gas rig and a Type 42 destroyer, HMS Edinburgh, in protest at proposals to make almost a thousand workers at the yard redundant ...”

“... Billy Wilder’s​  Some Like It Hot, now showing in a new print at the BFI, was based on a German film called Fanfares of Love, first made in French in 1935 and then remade in 1951. Wilder, in 1959, was thinking mainly of the original, which he said was ‘deliriously bad’. Coming from him this was a compliment rather than a complaint, and he certainly found in the old work the basic premise of the new one: two male musicians join an all-woman band ...”

“... drug-running methods when, in order to smuggle ammunition through Japanese lines, they fill a billy-goat with hundreds of bullets and stitch up its rectum. The worst single atrocity, minutely related, must be the slow skinning alive of Uncle Arhat by the village butcher on the orders of a Japanese officer. It rains heavily that night, washing the earth ...”

“... nine other suspects and assigns them code letters, as required by legal process. The police can name the six suspects who are linked to the weapons since they’ve been convicted of crimes in which these weapons were used, but they have to be careful to state that it can’t be assumed these men were involved in the Kingsmill killings. The second story in ...”

“... hate slavery – cling by the abolitionists – and in America, you will do honour to the name of Ireland.’ By and large, however, Irish-Americans ignored O’Connell, and the appeals of Frederick Douglass for Irish and black to make common cause. The Irish newspaper in New York changed its name from the Citizen ...”

“... while he would be allowed to sit Finals, he would not be allowed to take his degree and his ‘name would be struck from the rolls of the college.’ It was this last that really appalled him: ‘to have my name struck from the rolls of the college! As freshmen we had been taken up to the Savile Room to inscribe our ...”

“... wit America had ever produced, and the writing of ‘Bartleby’, and ‘Benito Cereno’, and Billy Budd. It is – it should be – a tremendous story, perhaps the greatest in American letters, but Parker has botched it. Herman Melville is above all a family portrait. Melville is surrounded, at all times and in all places, by his relatives and ...”

“... and his dates were already there, so there wasn’t a great deal of space. There would be Jim’s name and dates of course, but there had also to be something else to signify and summarise a life. The conversations yielded seven candidates: Patriot, Trade Unionist, International Brigader, Anti-Fascist, Marxist, Socialist, Communist. There was room for two, at ...”

“... nothing but the confusion of mind of the people who compiled it. Nothing and No One deserving the name of a God could conceivably be apprehended by it.’ These thoughts are foisted on Norman Shotover, who elsewhere displays an IQ a bare couple of points above Bertie Wooster’s. Even on the formal level these satires are disappointing: after some early ...”