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“... of mind, indifferently.’) I admire the directness of dumping the mind and proceeding to what Patricia Churchland calls Neurophilosophy, the title of her influential book on the subject. Doing so does not prevent us stick-in-the-muds from talking, in our folksy way, about being too embarrassed to pick up the phone. But Putnam wanted to understand the ...”

“... weakness in her writing is the sentences. ‘I don’t think my prose is fantastic,’ she told Patricia Lockwood in an interview two years ago – I felt this when I started taking notes on Intermezzo, but hadn’t thought much about it before. As I lay in the sun reading galleys dog-eared by three colleagues before me, the point of a Sally Rooney novel ...”

“... of age in the 1930s and 1940s and included Richard Wright (born 1908), Ralph Ellison (1914) and James Baldwin (1924), Himes has never quite entered the pantheon. His peers were condescending: Wright never took him seriously as an artist; Ellison, who saw him as little more than an ex-con with a pen, joked that Himes must have been the model for Bigger ...”

“... had availed himself of some of those techniques in L’Étranger, whose deadpan style owed much to James Cain’s noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Coming from a country where rationing was still in effect, he was unnerved by America’s enormous wealth, but even more unnerved by what struck him as its blissful amnesia: ‘This great country, calm and ...”

“... fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no woman. Keep your tires to yourself. Nor am I Pericles Prince of Tyre.’ Indeed, one way to suggest a noisy crowd circa 1609 was to invoke an audience for Pericles: describing a packed ...”

“... daughter Daisy Bevan will appear in her first feature film, The Two Faces of January, adapted from Patricia Highsmith. (The casting director has claimed to have been unaware of who she was, even though the film is being produced by Working Title, Tim Bevan’s production company.) Lynn said there was a gene running through all the Redgraves with a proscenium ...”

“... if a hospital goes bust somebody takes up the slack. Lansley chose 19 July, the day Rupert and James Murdoch had the media transfixed with their testimony to the Culture Select Committee, to let slip that from next April a billion pounds’ worth of NHS services, including wheelchair services for children and ‘talking therapies’ for people suffering ...”

“... who constitute a priesthood: ‘the death-of-language writers are self-ordained priests’ (James Stalker, in Greenbaum). John Silverlight, in his excerpted columns about usage and abusage that constitute Words, is prompt to make clear that he is playing down, not laying down, the law: ‘What I am not, to the disappointment of some colleagues, is a ...”

“... book?’). Chris tries her best with Charlotte Stant and Maggie Verver, but chirruping about Henry James novels isn’t really what she’s all about. ‘The Dumb Cunt’ is more her style, ‘a factory of emotions’; her passion has sent her back into adolescence, ‘hunched up in a leather jacket’, listening to the Ramones. She’s creeped out ...”

“... names as Francis Coventry, Thomas Holcroft or Robert Paltock should be left out. (Not to mention James Boswell, author of Dorando.) The omission of John Cleland may be deliberate and provocative – it provokes me to cheerful assent – but Spender’s researches have apparently not extended to the point were she has heard of Congreve’s famous ...”

“... me she had read my book, The Apparitional Lesbian, and ‘agreed with me entirely’ about Henry James and The Bostonians. She made me describe at length how I’d met my then girlfriend. (‘She wrote you a letter! And you answered? Terry, I’m amazed! I get those letters all the time, but I would never answer one! Of course, Terry, I’m ...”

“... the historian of modern Wales): its emphasis on the Party’s Welsh component (Mabon, Noah Ablett, James Griffiths, Aneurin Bevan). Morgan also has a sharp eye for important or significant but neglected figures. How right he is, for example, to see the career of the political scientist Harold Laski as one of ‘intense and enduring human interest as a tale of ...”

“... Rutherford, the actress who originally played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a ...”

“... The vessel was the bark Endeavour; the commander was the bluff, 39-year-old Yorkshireman James Cook, who was also an able astronomer. No one had thought to add natural history to the workload, but Banks got wind of the plan and thrust himself forward. He secured his place on the Endeavour by pulling strings – Lord Sandwich, a former first lord of ...”

“... Everything she says about him has to be taken on trust, since from the evidence of his work (and Patricia Morrisroe’s eye-opening biography) you get a rather different impression: that of a distinctly un-spiritual man, cold, aloof, a manipulative careerist. You might even argue that if or when his images work, it is because they insist not on the joyously ...”