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“... Spark seems to have lost interest in T.S. Eliot from that point on. Her edition of the letters of John Henry Newman, however, went ahead as planned. And her interest in Job and his dreadful afflictions, the capricious God who made him suffer dreadfully for the sake of a wager, and his horrible friends who only made things worse, she displaced, with a ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... mother who had more to do with forming the taste and character of the man Joe became. Elizabeth Parker Mitchell, called Betty, was the first on either side of the family to earn a college degree (Southern Presbyterian in Red Springs, North Carolina) and she wanted her children to feel they were part of the larger world. She subscribed to dozens of magazines ...”

“... mark.The postwar bebop jazzmen employed musical quotations even more often than Ellington. Charlie Parker frequently concludes fast-paced, hard-swinging numbers by stopping on a dime and gaily quoting – out of tempo, with leisurely elegance – from Percy Grainger’s Country Gardens, a Brancusi cartoon crown of musical notes that evokes an English ...”

“... what could have been his final piece of dance: a rendering, in perfect stillness in his chair, of John Cage’s 4’33”. In LA, a craggy David Hockney sits in a chair surrounded by paintings he has made of other people sitting in chairs, in preparation for his own Royal Academy show. Shot from the side, he clutches his cigarette between his knuckles. Every ...”

“... The places​ were Philadelphia and New York, the names were John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Bill Evans and a few others, heirs to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, spoken of with awe in every version of the story. Something called West Coast jazz, thought by many to be an oxymoron, was making itself heard in the persons of Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Shelly Manne and Dave Brubeck ...”

“... of him executing an army looter, then visiting Shanghai when it is liberated and losing his Parker pen to a pickpocket. We may wonder about the more serious effect of losing his first two wives. One was a ‘rare beauty’ who died of puerperal fever, another abandoned him when he was attacked in an early factional struggle. Were these also occasions ...”

“... before telling me I was the latest visitor in a tradition of literary visitors stretching back to John Milton. He said it very kindly, but I wanted to laugh. However, something high in his red cheeks warned me neither to laugh nor to make any reference to Paradise Lost. I simply smiled and composed my wits and followed him over the black and claret tiles to ...”

“... when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels. Lowell decided that Clark should quit smoking and, when Clark ...”

“... with more detailed contextualising narratives and a wider cast of tragic characters (Dorothy Parker, who was blacklisted in Hollywood; H.L. Mencken, who came under suspicion for his German background during both wars; John O’Hara, whose many failures included a job application to the fledgling CIA). The book’s ...”

“... a generic way, the upbringing of a young gentlewoman with a future at the Tudor court. Born Jane Parker, around 1505, she grew up, probably, on her father’s estates in Essex. Jane’s mother was Alice St John, daughter of a Bedfordshire landowner. Her father was Henry, Lord Morley, the scholarly translator of Petrarch ...”

“... is this, written by the man who made it?It would be hard to deliver a brief biographical sketch of John Boorman that was tidy or plausible. Yet it would be harder still to leave a reader in any doubt about his integrity, his passion and his blithe disdain for success, more radiant than gloomy. At 87, it’s his life, and he has resolved to treat it as a ...”

“... The Darwin scholar, John Greene, once summarised the Darwinian revolution as the triumph of a dynamic and non-teleological structuring of nature over static, teological systems: the triumph of chance and change over design and permanence, the triumph of objectivity in the life sciences, of secularism and naturalism over clericalism and the supernatural ...”

“... victims have yet to be identified – was a much more modern serial killer than Sutcliffe. Tony Parker’s excellent book indirectly offers important insight into the phenomenon of serial murder. As Joel Norris remarks, it is the ‘weight’ of the crime that undoes most murderers – the weight of their guilt, and, in the vast majority of cases, the ...”

“... McCullough’s Truman (1992) was on the bestseller lists for the better part of a year, and his John Adams (2001) is providing an astonishing repeat performance. Robert Caro’s dramatically detailed look at The Years of Lyndon Johnson has been unfolding since 1982, and large chunks of Volume Three have been serialised in the New Yorker. In the ...”