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“... arresting Rodney King, a black man, Unsworth won half the Booker Prize – the other half went to Michael Ondaatje for The English Patient – for a novel that in its unsparing portrayal of life aboard an 18th-century slave ship looked back to the colonial and commercial origins of racial tensions in North America. With its description of a multicultural ...”

“... other people first – in the years since the war than actually died in battle. In Dispatches, Michael Herr describes meeting an ocean-eyed Lurp (a former member of a Long Range Patrol) who, between tours, would stick a hunting rifle out of the window of his parents’ home and draw aim on passing cars and people: ‘It used to put my folks real ...”

“... Princess Diana? It’s pretty much a case of choose your own conspiracy theory, unless you’re Michael Burgess, Coroner of the Queen’s Household, whose tedious task it now is to ascertain the manner of Diana’s death. Entirely by coincidence, Burgess will also preside over the inquest into the death of Dodi Fayed, because Fayed is buried on the family ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... of his exotic cast, to leaven the lump of company accounts, technology and policy. Sir Roderick Jones, head and dominant owner of Reuters in the Twenties and Thirties, was a snob. He liked to employ Etonians, partly, to do him justice, because Reuters men were supposed to be able to mix easily with diplomats and foreign ministers. In 1933 the Etonian Ian ...”

“... does not go out of his way to stimulate such a positive response – not in The Life and Times of Michael K, anyway. Michael K was born with a hare lip, ‘curved like a snail’s foot while the left nostril gaped’, so that his mother ‘shivered to think what had been growing in her all these months’. He is too ...”

“... Sartre’s No Exit in New York. The Freud oeuvre was hardly natural material for Hollywood, but Jones’s biography and the version of the Freud-Fliess letters then just published led Huston to think that Freud’s discovery of the unconscious would make a gripping intellectual adventure story. He also hoped the picture would send his audience out into the ...”

“... Yet another film version of Hamlet has been made, this time adapted for the screen and directed by Michael Almereyda. Bloomsbury will be publishing the book of the film next month, for the benefit of those 77.3 per cent who’d rather read a book than go to the movies. On the cover is a pouting Ethan Hawke (who played the Pip character in Alfonso Cuarón’s ...”

“... in a rage, Christina could be a ripper and a smasher. The elder sister, Maria, and loyal William Michael were the ‘calms’. On ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ William’s editorial comment was: ‘I have more than once been asked whether I could account for the outburst of exuberant joy evidenced in this celebrated lyric; I am unable to do ...”

“... of England and have no wish to take sides in the quarrels of Muslims.’ The writer is D.A.N. Jones, who between 1980 and 1992 wrote 64 pieces for this paper and who died on 23 November. He had arrived in Baghdad the previous day, in response to ‘an agreeably casual’ Iraqi invitation to a ‘writers’ conference’. His intention, he said, had been ...”

“... the mole-inspired disasters, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smiley’s diligent gofer, Colin Firth, Toby Jones, David Dencik, Ciarán Hinds as high-ups in British intelligence, all candidates for the ultimately declared position of mole – and the director’s elegant hand is everywhere. Tomas Alfredson is best known for his bleak vampire movie Let the Right One ...”

“... on the floor.I knew that the captain of the Bonhomme Richard had been a Scotsman called John Paul Jones: I had once passed through Kirkbean, the Kirkcudbrightshire village where he was born. And I was vaguely aware that Jones had been involved in a daring raid on Whitehaven in Cumbria, although – since he was said to be ...”

“... an executor. The other executors are Andrew Motion, Larkin’s authorised biographer, and Monica Jones, Larkin’s longtime companion. It was Miss Jones who undertook the destruction of the 25 volumes of Larkin’s diaries (although, tantalisingly, they may have been peeked at before shredding). As Hamilton points ...”

“... their media-men (like most British media-men) lean towards the SDP and they point to the fact that Michael Foot’s huge overflow meeting attracted less press wonder and applause than Shirley Williams’s. But to a Londoner, these local papers seem pretty fair and accurate – stating but not overstating the obvious fact, recognised by the Telegraph papers in ...”

“... repeatedly cites the claim that Charlie Parker became Charlie Parker only because the drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at him and almost took his head off. True to the theory, Simmons hits and humiliates his students constantly until one day our boy secretly denounces him and Simmons loses his job. The trouble is that our boy was in agreement with Simmons all ...”