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“... between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate to authorise a biography of T.S. Eliot ...”

“... strength: but they also tried, eventually, to run the ball. The Australian captain Nick Fan-Jones ‘dreaded’, afterwards, ‘to think what might have happened had England been used to getting the ball wide and knowing what to do with it when it really mattered’. That seems right, and Campese, the arch-exponent of running rugby, could be felt to be ...”

“... perceptive to see any real promise in either work. They have a galumphing comic quality, as of a Brian Rix farce turned into a story, and P.G. Wodehouse could have reshaped them. At best, they show Dostoevsky as the greatest playwright that Russia never had, for in them he sharpens his gift for causing the character and intrigue of a novel to develop ...”

“... glorifying the work of the Velvet Underground over Motown releases, the production skills of Brian Wilson over those of Norman Whitfield, and the social significance and songwriting talent of John Lennon rather than James Brown – persists. Clearly, too, most rock writing foregrounds lyrics, whereas most dance music works through texture, beats and ...”

“... new medium. In 1952 he made contact with another producer looking for a TV project, Andrew Miller Jones. Miller Jones was an ex-Army officer with a yellow Rolls-Royce, the first of a large number of Panorama staff over the next fifty years with either a military background or an ostentatious personal style, or ...”

“... from Chaucer to Spenser and Shakespeare and Donne, through Milton and Blake and Keats, to David Jones, Gascoyne, Dylan Thomas, Nicholas Moore, to Lee Harwood’s Cable Street, Bill Griffiths’s Whitechapel and Brian Catling’s The Stumbling Block. London infected its interpreters, soliciting contributions to an ...”

“... to remember the name of Ling’s brother-in-law, which is ‘standard-issue Caucasian, like Brian or Tim, a Californian, beige hair and beige skin and beige trousers’. Even with the disaster of Kweku’s desertion the Sai family makes its way in the world. Sadie is the closest the family has to an underachiever, and Sadie studies at Yale. Yet racism ...”

“... even the translator’s, let’s assume it’s Dr Blau’s and that the book is choosing to give Brian May the last word in the scene: ‘There’s no chance for us/It’s all decided for us/This world has only one sweet moment set aside for us.’ For Taina and Dr Blau this is not that moment. There’s one​ noticeable omission from the book’s ...”

“... Penguin, Picador, Harvill or Faber anthologies. The editors give us a spread of generations, from Brian Coffey (1905-95) and Jonathan Griffin (1906-90) to Catherine Walsh (b. 1964) and Fred D’Aguiar (b. 1960), and represent a wide diversity of poetic practices. They also tell us the names of another fifty-odd poets they would have liked to put in ...”

“... regiment or publisher, or who (having slavered with the best of them over the early flowering of Jones minor) is now a sleek and rotund editor of something like the Times or the Spectator. Peregrine Worsthorne, in this rather idle but charming book,* strives to come across as a sort of Catholic version of Gray. His father was a member of that Belgian ruling ...”

“... Rome and Capua. If only Mr Harbison had known of it, he could have reduced atrocity to a Life of Brian giggle by remarking: ‘What a liberty.’ Only in the blankest ignorance could Mr Harbison assert that, in the ‘rearrangement of human nature’ which he locates in the 19th century, ‘capacities which had always been despised, the least knowable ...”

“... for all that, it wears its density more or less lightly. It favours stories about gangland hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap ...”

“... a stetson, jodhpur-like trousers and tall leather boots. He looks like an Edwardian Indiana Jones, or some strange dystopian scoutmaster living half-wild in the woods. Fellow explorers described him as having an ‘indomitable will’ and ‘infinite resource’, a man ‘in hand to hand combat with the wilderness’. In Conan Doyle’s South American ...”

“... that the Buddha was a Negro. Various British residents in India, including the great Sir William Jones, discoverer of the Indo-European language roots, echoed this: the Buddha had the nose and lips and the ‘crisp and woolly’ hair of Africans. (Others thought that the curls on the Buddha’s head were snails.) Athanasius Kircher, whose name is always ...”

“... But they were greeted with almost unanimous critical disapproval and were box-office failures. Brian de Palma’s Redacted – in my view one of the two masterpieces among the four, along with Paul Haggis’s In the Valley of Elah – failed even to cover its modest production budget. There was no lack of star appeal in the films: Tom Cruise, Meryl ...”