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“... designs, sober covers and superior typography (hangovers, as Morpurgo demonstrates, from John Lane’s Bodley Head). The Penguin aura was of solid, durable literature and (as Pelicans) sensible discussion. To work the paradox to death, one might claim that Penguins were paperbacks which, for most of their history, successfully passed themselves off ...”

“... informing symbol or emblem of Little Dorrit is the prison.’ The novelist is known to be of John Carey’s persuasion on the subject of the Dickens industry’s symbol-hunting. He makes his point with a heavily satirised gay Canadian Cambridge don who researches ‘his’ author, surrounded by congenial works like Dickens: The Baroque Lamp and Dickens ...”

“... publisher) in 1958. Now a top editor, he cultivated the house’s top authors. Auden, Dr Seuss and John O’Hara are recalled here in vivid anecdotes. A bunch of his authors line up to offer puffs for Book Business: ‘brilliant, moving and profoundly insightful’ (Toni Morrison); ‘a putative classic … fine and impeccable style’ (Norman Mailer); ‘an ...”

“... Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in previous volumes, about half the letters (here they number 247) are hitherto unpublished, and of the rest many are now published for the first time in their full form. There are the inevitable routine and ...”

“... John le Carré has patiently established himself over the last twenty-five years as the discriminating reader’s favourite thriller writer. The BBC’s adaptations of the George Smiley trilogy in 1979 and 1982 made him almost overnight a popular author on the Ian Fleming scale, and it can have done no harm that the TV version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy coincided with the Blunt scandal ...”

“... He was subjected to even more abuse from the British press and public than Nasser or John Foster Dulles. In a widely photographed incident, Altrincham was physically assaulted. His assailant shouted to the pressmen he had summoned to watch: ‘This is for insulting the Queen!’ The papers – except the Times, which on advice from the palace ...”

“... back have sold getting on for $900m worth of tickets. C-3PO and R2-D2 are as well known as Pope John Paul or Mickey Mouse. Lucas’s second movie and first hit, American Graffiti (produced by Francis Coppola, conceived and directed by Lucas), was the most profitable investment in Hollywood history: it brought in $117m against a production cost of ...”

“... and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations authorise a ...”

“... to go into now.’ Recent sleuthing has filled in some of the gaps. Nicholas Barker and John Collins’s A Sequel to ‘An Enquiry’ (1983) clarifies the role of Wise’s reluctant partner, Harry Buxton Forman. The forgers’ liaison is fleshed out further in the biographical The Two Forgers, which offers the fullest and most readable narrative to ...”

“... achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is ...”

“... Harnforth? Mr Tim Harnforth?’ One and Last Love is Mr Tim Harnforth’s novel as well as Mr John Braine’s. An authorial confidence informs us that it was originally conceived with more melodramatic action to it. The hero was to find himself stricken with a terminal disease and be forced to a climax of love and death. But instead, the novelist was ...”

“... level, there is rivalry among two of Freddie’s pupils to fill the part of Prince Arthur in King John. One boy is crude but magnetic and destined for stardom; the other is finer-grained, a true Thespian. Their opposition is less interesting than Fitzgerald’s sharply accurate evocation of an old-style West End production of Shakespeare, footlights and ...”

“... the heroine (born in 1844 and now 17) has been brought up. The inmates are described, among them John Vroom, ‘a thin, dark, knifish boy about fourteen’ whose doxy is (implausibly) ‘stitching dog-skins onto stolen dogs, to make them seem handsomer breeds than what they really were’, as Vroom himself does ‘a deal with a dog-thief. This man had a ...”

“... Some readers do not much like Margaret Drabble’s later novels because they are so different from her earlier successes. She may have lost one public and not as yet entirely won over another. Her novel writing career began brilliantly and precociously with A Summer Bird-Cage (1963), published when she was 24. Since then, the preoccupations of her novels have generally kept pace with what one assumes to have been her personal progress from Cambridge graduate, through marriages, pregnancies, growing children, marital complications, and high professional achievement, to what in 1980 – her 40th year – she memorably called ‘The Middle Ground ...”

“... Momentous changes in copyright law, such as those of 1710, 1842, 1890 and 1911, are preceded by periods of turmoil and radical uncertainty about the rights and wrongs of intellectual property. We are in such a period now. The problem, in the short term, is how the British Government will implement the ‘harmonising’ of the latest EU regulations on copyright ...”