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“... a shoestring, all-British satellite launcher. The Space Department won. In 1965 the RAE got the green light to construct their Black Arrow vehicle – on condition that it cost virtually nothing. It’s hard to imagine a cheap space rocket. Our image of rockets was fixed by the Apollo programme: gigantic, overwhelming, needing the deep pockets of a ...”

“... have heard’). ‘Barbara,’ Edmund Wilson decided, ‘is really a bad lot’: so bad that when David Pryce-Jones came to write his memoir of Connolly he thought it best to say nothing about her at all. On the other hand, it is part both of her disobliging character and its attraction that in compiling her own memoirs she does nothing to minimise her ...”

“... came to Ethiopia in 1769 to look for the source of the Nile and took away with him the Songs of David, Kibre Negest (‘Glory of the Kings’) and the Book of Enoch, which he no doubt considered as souvenirs or going-home presents to himself. As well as being a sacred artefact, the Kibre Negest relates much of Ethiopia’s early history. It was returned to ...”

“... books were decorated with Bewick woodcuts; the later ones, like Spoken History, owe much to David Gentleman’s line-drawings. Gentleman’s illustrations can be surrounded in the mind’s eye in the same way as Bewick’s can, by an enclosing circle, so that we feel we might reach out and grasp that little world, take hold of the lost ...”

“... indefatigably in the high blue sky. I bought a car (top priority in LA) for $400 – a dented green Chevy Nova with ripped seats and an unquenchable thirst for oil. The Nova did not quite have the vulgar style of my earlier Impala, a two-toned gas-guzzling yacht-like structure into whose rearview mirror police cars would often loom: but at least the Nova ...”

“... words, the Web introduced a new, non-linear architecture: duck did not have to collocate with green peas, it could also go in other contexts, alongside cricket, eider-filled duvets and any number of other things. Lateral jumps could be made instantaneously simply by clicking on an icon, or using a ‘search engine’, such as Yahoo, Lycos, Alta-Vista or ...”

“... depending on insider knowledge only others in the trade need feel troubled or titillated by. David Lodge, quoted on an Adair dust jacket saying that The Death of the Author is ‘brilliant, worthy of Nabokov’, is doing something of this kind, pretending innocence, tactfully avoiding the question of pastiche, of who’s actually in charge of this ...”

“... was one of homeliness, craftsmanship and simplicity. Its location was the cottage and the village green, not the great hall and the long gallery. Objects of relative indifference to a philistine public, country houses were seen by a barbarian aristocracy under economic pressure as assets to be exploited. There were regular auctions of furniture and pictures ...”

“... not least Freud’s, Kitty is remarkably covered up; she wears a jumper with ribbed neck and green contoured stripes, and a voluptuous velvet skirt. But Freud’s meticulous naturalism and the translucence of his flesh tones lend an almost indecent air of exposure to the portrait. It’s easy to see why critics have interpreted Girl with Roses as a ...”

“... all conceivably be a figment of Seth’s increasingly deranged imagination. There is a series of David Lynch-style time-slip and personality-slip effects. One moment he is in jail in present-day Mississippi; the next he’s a black man in the 1920s, charged with a crime he didn’t commit. The second half of the book is skilfully constructed, page by ...”

“... that survives precious. Some of the best medieval poems – Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – have come down to us in a single manuscript. Four books contain about two-thirds of all surviving Old English poetry, and for a few months in 2018 those four lay side by side in a single (doubtless heavily insured) glass case for an exhibition at ...”

“... of risky professional choices: 35 West 9th Street was a handsome Italianate prewar co-op with a green awning anchored to polished brass poles and late-blooming geraniums spilling from terraced window boxes high above; 72 Perry Street, sandwiched between stately townhouses, was a mute, shabby rowhouse painted over in a hideous maroon, with shaded windows ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... every anonymous work sends us off in search of an author. Finding out who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight might deepen our understanding of the poem, but it might prove no more enlightening than finding out who bolted down the final rivet on the Forth Bridge. There are literary works in which what speaks is less a personal voice than a set of ...”

“... later to a belief that it would save trouble if she gave them to the NSPCC, ‘who bring a green bag round every week to collect the waste paper’. But the inevitable gaps in the material do not excuse the fact that the book is so badly edited. The sparse footnotes are whimsical to a degree, telling us that when Fitzgerald mentioned that her ...”