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“... this is the Wild West. Jimmy is a figure out of the 1840s. And very little separates Barry from Jim Bowie. The big difference, you realise, is the hardware – the AK-47s and the MiGs. An idle thought strikes me: Mugabe’s helicopter criss-crosses the sky all day and for security reasons no one else is allowed to fly one. But you do see big four-engined ...”

“... to the slaves’ African pasts’ in their work routines, religious practices and folkways such as ring dances. There is less on how Africans became African-Americans, or the extent to which they were influenced by the values of the society around them. When emancipation finally arrived, Bailey notes, the former slaves saw the right to vote ‘as the heart and ...”

“... uncharacteristically admits to repressing spontaneity and passion, even the confession has a false ring about it, as though unable to overcome its own repressed cause. This sort of class sclerosis is brilliantly depicted in a chapter of James Stern’s The Hidden Damage. Arriving unannounced in London shortly after VE Day from the US, where he has spent the ...”

“... is derived from the name of a young African-American mother of five, whose agonising death in a Jim Crow era charity hospital gave rise to a quiet revolution in medicine. In January 1951, at the age of 30, Henrietta Lacks was admitted to the ‘Coloured Only’ examination room of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, complaining of abdominal pain and ...”

“... tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick of being excessively friendly and polite’. He ...”

“... but artfully layered. Schulman set up an Aids oral history project in 2001 with the filmmaker Jim Hubbard and conducted nearly two hundred interviews with surviving ACT UP members over a period of seventeen years (full transcripts are available online as well as excerpts in video form). They asked questions about their subjects’ lives before the ...”

“... of shinrin-yoku, land-sat interpreters, climatologists, wood butchers, picnickers, foresters, ring counters and the rest of us.’ ‘Wood butchers’, a dismissive term for incompetent carpenters, seems an odd inclusion – why should carpenters be so disparaged when loggers and sawyers go uncriticised? The answer may be the reluctant admiration for ...”

“... in attending an illegal boxing club called Hyde’s, in which rent boys pummel each other in the ring and then have sex with the audience afterwards. Rebus breaks up the club but the cover-up is effective and no news ever gets out. Where Knots & Crosses was an exploration of the formal aspect of the Jekyll and Hyde story, Hide & Seek is a study of the moral ...”

“... guess what they are. I even wanted to entitle my book Lucky Kim, by analogy with Conrad’s Lucky Jim. But then we decided that this title probably wasn’t serious enough.Well, no, I can quite see how it might fail a seriousness test. (One can almost hear the shade of Peter Cook, intoning regretfully how he ‘never had the reading for the spying’.) Lord ...”

“... and Larkin’s attitude to him is affectionate and critical; reading the manuscript of Lucky Jim, he comments that Amis has no idea how people talk. In 1957 he writes about his rejection of Yeats, who had influenced him in his youth. He says that Yeats and Hardy now seem like ‘opposites to me, like Disraeli & Gladstone’, and finds Yeats ‘an utterly ...”

“... In the autumn​ of 1994, Jim Grant, a technical director at Granada Television, went to the Arndale Centre in Manchester and bought three A4 pads and a pencil. He was nearly forty and about to lose his job thanks to corporate restructuring, which he’d spent two years fighting as a union shop steward. His plan was to make a living as a novelist, and he set to work on a thriller, using as his models Alistair MacLean and the Travis McGee series by John MacDonald, which focuses on a happy-go-lucky investigator with a romantic code of honour ...”

“... old chapel or a revamped industrial unit. Corporate operations are generous with their holdings: Jim Dine figures you glimpse from an arcade, secured by thick glass and ever-vigilant surveillance systems, large pieces by major names lost in Edenic atria, pastiches and approximations in side-streets and obscure courtyards. Art is the climate. If you aren’t ...”

“... dresses, imagining a return to the travelling-shot world of Jeanne Moreau in Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Boris Johnson, an alpha male with a high-pumped sense of entitlement, demonstrated no false modesty about claiming credit for an idea that had very little to do with him. Ken Livingstone toyed with cycling ‘initiatives’ and despatched Lycra cadres with ...”

“... to fail but was still living on her own in her mews flat she would sometimes get confused and ring her daughter Jan for reassurance. She rang one day to say: ‘I’m in the studio doing this picture with John Wayne. Only he’s gone out and left me. And everybody else has gone out and left me and I’m stuck here on my own.’Jan said: ‘Mum. You’re ...”

“... The small press volumes, with the lush abandon of their time, came with an apparatus of seduction: Jim Dine ink-blots and fingerprints, proper paper and bindings, care, attention, swagger. Poetry puffed its chest (soliciting its own demise). It was still the flipside of pop culture, real lyrics that millionaire rock stars fed on. Ugly things growled in the ...”