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“... The keeping of diaries prompts the question why, and for whom? James Boswell at 22, and going to London for the first time, piously hoped that keeping a diary might engender ‘a habit of application and improve me in expression’, possibly even ‘make me more careful to do well’. At all events, 24 pages of this self-imposed devoir were sent off each Tuesday to his friend John Johnston of Grange, a dullish youth of about Boswell’s own age, but one in whose affectionate and uncritical company he felt more at peace than with anyone ...”

“... According to its dust-jacket, Jack Maggs is ‘by the author of Oscar and Lucinda’. It is in some respects unlike that novel, being shorter, darker and less furiously though still adequately inventive. Its economy may shock some folk, for Peter Carey is known to be an exuberant novelist, copious, various and fantastic ...”

“... Jack ‘did a Jack’ and missed our father’s funeral. He had taken his new girl to the Gargoyle Club the night before and had woken with such a monumental hangover that the train had left Paddington before he was out of bed. Explaining this to my mother on the telephone later in the day, he had boasted not only about the hangover but also about the new girl, who was just seventeen and had a marvellous figure – almost like a boy’s ...”

“... whom would ever feel comfortable with English, he was telling the world, in his own words, about Jack London, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck. He was announcing – as his exact contemporary Saul Bellow would announce a decade later in The Adventures of Augie March – a new addition to the canon of American sensibility. But the cost would be ...”

“... Bethnal Green via Spitalfields to Whitechapel, famous in its day for such do-badding criminals as Jack the Ripper, and for such do-gooding enterprises as Toynbee Hall. More precisely, White’s volume recovers the fabric of Jewish life among those immigrants who lived in one East End tenement block, while Samuel’s puts between hard covers the ordered ...”

“... a self-contained, rather bohemian artists’ community, between Hammersmith and Acton in West London. William was 23, Susan Yeats (or Lily, as she was known within the family) was 22, Elizabeth (Lolly) 20. Their father, who had given up the law shortly after he married in order to paint, had very little money; their mother, who had been a ...”

“... The London architecture​ you are permitted to notice, Caroline Knowles reckons, is just money on display. In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund ...”

“... fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski slopes as in Windsor Castle. After making millions in banking, real estate and film distribution, the father wants to devote his life to public ...”

“... to miss, and I thumbed back up and I found out what it was. It was an actor. He was called Jack MacGowran. I had not heard of him before. Robert Armstrong, two or three years older than me, was already studying in the College of Art, and it was he who told me the story when I arrived. He was the stage manager for the one-man show which this actor was ...”

“... are raised about his percentage of the take), and then enters Tory politics as the late Greater London Council’s youngest-ever councillor. The Louth by-election beckons. Archer wins with a vastly increased Tory majority, and wins again in two succeeding general elections. The charity business booms. Archer says he need never work again. Then the first ...”

“... everywhere, or to write very little. It is a question of temperament . . . My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event. It is in the nature of Prynne’s project ...”

“... to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist Donald Woods proposed a series of interviews with him, Astor suggested that the theme shouldn’t be ‘How did a rich boy come to be so ...”

“... to these United States. Writing in the days when ‘white socialism’ was still thinkable for Jack London, himself and others, Sinclair said of the dark-skinned underclass in Chicago: ‘The ancestors of these black people had been savages in Africa, and since then they had been chattel slaves, or had been held down by a community ruled by the ...”

“... By coincidence, the first play for which he designed sets, in 1920, was The Mexican, based on a Jack London story; it was while working on this that he met Alexandrov, who played an American boxer. But there is little in Eisenstein’s stage designs to suggest he was familiar with Mexican culture: that came later in the 1920s, through Russian literary ...”

“... the ‘yellow peril’ was being widely bandied about among press and politicians, as writers like Jack London or J.H. Hobson conjured up a future Chinese takeover of the world. Within another few decades, the pendulum swung back, as Pearl Buck and Madame Chiang won popular sympathy for China’s gallant struggle against Japan. After 1948, in a further ...”