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“... should ‘use newspapers the way private diaries and personal letters were once used. At white heat, in the rush of an emotion, stimulated by an event, you write your reflections, hoping that someone will read them and then forget them.’ He appears to have missed the arrogance of the verb ‘use’ and the self-importance of thus imposing upon ...”

“... It is due for general release early next year. Available colours will include black, orange, grey, white and blue, or to put it in Google-speak: ‘charcoal, tangerine, shale, cotton, sky’. The prototypes have already gone out and are being used by the first generation of – sensitive readers will want their sickbags to hand – ‘Glass Explorers’. The ...”

“... greatness. They have been performed magnificently by, for example, Joan Baez, Jimi Hendrix and the White Stripes. Then there was Donovan, a bit like Dan Bern without the sense of humour, or the critical distance. A.J. Weberman, self-styled Dylanologist, burrowed into the singer’s rubbish bins to try to make sense of him. And countless others have applied ...”

“... away from her and died of pneumonia in a rural stationmaster’s house a few days later. Although William Nickell and the contemporary Russian journalists whose work he has explored for The Death of Tolstoy try to make an enigma of the 82-year-old writer’s ‘complex and provocative’ nocturnal flight from his ancestral home, the count had been brooding ...”

“... author proud, for this is a great slab of a book, on heavy paper, with over two hundred black and white illustrations, mostly disposed in wide margins, and there are 17 colour plates. The book is carefully designed, though less carefully copy-edited and proof-read; perhaps having it set in Hong Kong and printed in Singapore created problems. Still, the volume ...”

“... the Wild West’, Dylan’s Christian conversion, and his appearance as ‘Jewish Amerindian and White Negro’. It is all a bit too much, but at least Mellers takes care, unlike Jonathan Cott in his expensive, over-reverential tome: one more coffee-table book. It may seem a bit Dylanesque (i.e. slightly cruel) but I finished Cott’s book without being able ...”

“... are to be found in the index: Piltdown, Paul Kammerer of The Midwife Toad and the infamous William T. Summerlin. This last is the only case of a fraud in which I have been involved as a witness for the prosecution: Summerlin worked at the largest cancer research institute in the world, the Sloan-Kettering in New York, under the patronage of its ...”

“... He has views, he shouts, cajoles, threatens and sneers. He worships Kleist and Stendhal, loathes William Styron and Sainte-Beuve, is conspicuously silent about Flaubert and seems to have a love-hate relationship with Nabokov. He delights in summoning up his rhetoric of loathing for the Nazis and the Mafia and in distilling hard, frequently paradoxical ...”

“... the concert to himself. It was not quite a disaster. Edward had arranged for slides to be made of William Blake’s engravings for the Book of Job, and projected huge enlargements onto white sheets. Everyone was bored by the Oratorio, but found the engravings an impressive spectacle, except Misia Sert, the Parisian culture ...”

“... Afterwards she resolved to accept her addiction and shed her old identity; she dyed her hair white-blonde, became Anna Kavan, a name which seemed fortuitously reminiscent of Kafka. ‘Why does the K sound in a name symbolise the struggle of those who try to make themselves at home on a homeless borderland?’ she wrote. Asylum Piece, her first book ...”

“... The dim and sluggish hero finds himself standing next to an attractive blonde in a beret and white raincoat, whom he manages to ignore completely as he struggles to stay upright while unfurling his newspaper. She doesn’t quite return the lack of compliment. His antics amuse her, evidently, but there’s a hint of pleasurable speculation in her ...”

“... intentionally or mistakenly drunk a concoction called Battle’s Vermin Killer, which contained white phosphorus, a toxic substance which caused death after three days of agony. Montagu, Cholmondeley et al created an identity, that of Royal Marine Captain William ‘Bill’ Martin, for the corpse. They ‘discussed and ...”

“... sort of plot and the two men were buried alongside each other and their graves marked by plain white marble slabs bearing just their names and dates. Family photographs show both graves strewn with wreaths and flowers and Alfred’s headstone has an ornate wire frame fixed behind it, covered with more flowers. Amelia and Albert were the only mourners at ...”

“... first novel, The Swimming Pool Library (1988), is set during the summer of 1983. The narrator, William Beckwith, is a young aristocrat of leisure. He lives in Holland Park, swims at the Corinthian Club, a gay gym on Great Russell Street (‘the masterpiece of the architect Frank Orme, whom I once met at my grandfather’s’), and picks up men ...”

“... the Zoopraxiscope, a rotating version of the 19th-century magic lantern. Thomas Edison, along with William Dickson, invented the Kinetoscope, the machine that launched the commercial film industry, in 1891; in Edison’s Kinetoscope Parlours viewers peeped through a hole in the top of a wooden box to watch Annabelle Moore’s ‘Butterfly Dance’, to take one ...”