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“... psychology and the backchat of a paperhanger’. Sticking to his guns, he became (in the words of Frank O’Connor) ‘the greatest of all English storytellers’.Times change. Mention Coppard today and you’ll be met with blank looks. Until recently I knew him only by name, one I associated with a brand of gently nostalgic, middlebrow English writers who ...”

“... wanted to reread before he died. (He supplemented this list with the Australians Henry Handel Richardson and Martin Boyd as well as the Hungarian Gyula Illyés; references in his work suggest that Hardy, Lawrence and Nabokov have also occupied his attention significantly. He seems to loathe Norman Mailer and Peter Carey.) There was a hiatus of 14 years ...”

“... Anthology had seen off the rival Oxford Anthology, produced by heavyweight academics including Frank Kermode and Harold Bloom, and the deep histories of English and British culture were being re-scripted. A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British ...”

“... through this volume of what he would have called ‘good letters’ from this warm, direct, frank and clever man – intensely clever, exceptionally gifted and intelligent – it is impossible not to sense also his elusiveness: the literary quality that parallels his knack of evading not only female but male friends too, like sparkling water. Returning ...”

“... reproduction ‘made such an impression on me and so many others of my generation’, John Richardson later wrote.) The painting was shown in a Mayfair gallery, where it was bought by Michael Sadler, whose collection included work by Kandinsky, Rouault and Modigliani. Bacon’s next ambitious work was called Wound for a Crucifixion. John Russell ...”

“... 1992, when Neil Kinnock was party leader, the only female member of the shadow cabinet was Jo Richardson – as minister for women, inevitably. In 1990 the rules were changed: MPs now had to vote for at least three women in shadow cabinet elections. Harman says male MPs called this the Assisted Places Scheme and tried to sabotage it by spreading their ...”

“... explained, there would be no further investigation: he had to prioritise present-day crimes. Such frank admissions are surely rare, most likely drawn out of Jeffrey as his way of honouring Lukhanyo as his father’s son. Even those who see the forfeit of criminal justice by the commission as a historic error, or who argue, in the face of that critique, that ...”

“... Europe to Greece. Tony mentions in the poem her absent friends: George Devine, Ron Eyre, Tony Richardson, John and John (Dexter and Osborne), and at the conclusion a cake is brought in and Jocelyn is crowned with laurels. It could be thought pretentious but since Jocelyn is so far from pretentious it seems both fitting and moving.I sit on a sofa with Alan ...”

“... do like to feel that I have at least heard of the man who is writing the review!’). Out went Frank Swinnerton, Edmund Blunden, L.A.G. Strong and Arthur Bryant; in came A.L. Rowse, Maurice Richardson, Peter Quennell and Nancy Mitford. More important, it was Connolly who introduced Astor to Orwell, who became his friend ...”

“... of our apartment, I was always jumping all over them in a passion. In Straight Life Pepper is frank – and hilarious – on the subject of his looks. Detailing his stay in an expensive detox sanitorium in Los Angeles in the mid-1950s, he recalls prinking about in the nude after getting some huge shots of morphine to mitigate the symptoms of heroin ...”