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“... The square that is formed by King’s Cross, Lamb’s Conduit Street, Tottenham Court Road and Warren Street is one of my Londons, and the very centre of that London is Tavistock Square. If London is a city of prose, then this is the capital’s capital, a square of reason and memory and imagination. My home’s home. The London Review of Books had its ...”

“... stories to be hidden or revealed. Besides Enid’s, there is the strange history of her brother Warren, which runs from Korea to betrayed political idealism and an intense but finally betrayed love-affair in Philadelphia; that of her father Lyle, who moves into clearer focus as a frustrated figure of compromised integrity, a romantic whose life refuses to ...”

“... seemed to be no gap between what he saw and what he said – though he refused to admit it. As a young man, he had made his living as a graphic designer, picture editor and photographer. And made a life fired up by ‘heavyweight leftist politics – and art’. He said he had wanted to create ‘a visual style for the left’ and he developed one when ...”

“... Socialist Party candidate, was released with a commuted sentence on the orders of President Warren Harding.Debs won 3.4 per cent of the vote in that election, but Donald Trump is currently polling ahead of Joe Biden in five of the six states he needs if he is to win 270 electoral college votes on 5 November. The Republican primary electorate wants ...”

“... Parayre, was arrested, along with the disgraced family. His son-in-law, ‘a dashing but penniless young artist’, was widely considered guilty by association, and ‘from 1905 onwards, Matisse’s work was regularly dismissed by the critics as an attempt to pull a fast one on the public’ Biographers are often buttonholed by interesting minor characters ...”

“... to be a blueprint for democratic transformation. The story begins when the billionaire investor Warren Buffett, appalled by the failure of the federal government to respond to Hurricane Katrina, travels to New Orleans to pitch in with the relief effort. A ‘composed elderly grandmother’ somehow recognises him and says: ‘Only the super-rich can save ...”

“... playing favourites, but that didn’t stop us from disputing their choices. How could Robert Penn Warren prefer Kit Morton’s plain dying-grandmother story to Lance Leavitt’s stream-of-consciousness monologue from the viewpoint of a condemned man smoking his last cigarette while pouring daringly profane contempt over the judgment of a world that punishes ...”

“... sensationalism, however, the Whitechapel murders of 1888 were an episode apart. Sir Charles Warren, the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, was not exaggerating when he told the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews, that the murders were ‘unique in the history of our country’. They were not the first serial sex crimes, but the first media(ted) serial sex ...”

“... time to give the encounter at Holy Cross a thought. However, later that week I came across a pale young man with a moustache, and wondered where I knew him from. In a surreal moment of social embarrassment, I was at an IRA funeral with him and for a moment, I just couldn’t place him. What made it doubly awkward was that I couldn’t really avoid him. He was ...”

“... a marvellous one on a 90-year-old mountaineer who had known D. H. Lawrence? Terrible young man. Ran away with my friend Weekley’s wife. An elegy on the poet’s father keeps company with a long story poem, ‘An Abominable Temper’, about a 19th-century judge in the Native Land Court, writing to his daughter Ada. Enclosing three ...”

“... Lewis, whose Sagittarius Rising (1936) is the classic Flying Corps memoir, ‘the devil-may-care young bloods of England, the fast livers, the furious drivers.’ Airmen needed a low heart rate, had to be able to hold their breath for 45 seconds and to stabilise their eye movements quickly after being spun round in a typing chair. If they passed these tests ...”

“... Twenties), sentimental (ditto) old buffer who at the age of 57 had fallen in love with a fluffy young widow named Irene and, much to his surprise and dismay, been at once cheerfully packed off to the Continent with his bit of fluff by his wife. There Portia, the central character of the novel, was born; there the old boy died; there for some sixteen years ...”

“... and squeals that the most violent scenes in contemporary slasher and horror films excite from young spectators express their ‘gut reactions’ – the response of the flesh, their continuing capacity to wince. I’m not taking the argument so far as to say that Full Metal Jacket sensitises the body to empathy with others’ destruction, but that the ...”

“... Adam Smith was paid £8000, or the better part of a million pounds in today’s money, to take the young Duke of Buccleuch to France and Geneva for three years. Such independence permitted some Scots (such as Lords Monboddo and Buchan) to adopt an aristocratic attitude to their writing, and speak airily of wishing only to be ‘useful’. Others grumbled in ...”

“... The penultimate time I asked the young man over the way in my narrow terraced street to close his window when he played his CDs, he replied that the legally permitted decibel level was 85 dB and that he was not above it, would I like to see the read-out on his player and, by the way, I should ‘get a life’. I suggested that these particular rabbit-warren streets needed a degree of awareness of others, and he said from his window that he couldn’t care less about the local community or the people in it ...”