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“... the blood. It erupts like a protest or insurrection, a fleeting moment of lucidity. Seen in this light, the novel could be issuing a warning, or asking a question that is driving many responses to the world laid bare by Covid-19. Under what conditions can the truth of social deprivation be seen? ‘The lockdown worked like a chemical experiment that suddenly ...”

“... social life of the blessed as richly as the Paradiso does, requires a more rarefied imagination.As Alison Morgan showed in Dante and the Medieval Other World (1990), Dante didn’t innovate by incorporating contemporary figures in his epic. In fact, he included fewer than usual: contemporaries make up 69 per cent of the identifiable characters in popular ...”

“... Having set up this ambitious correspondence, however, the novel develops it with a very light touch. As foliage takes command of the residents’ lounge and the giant ‘M’ from the façade’s ‘MAJESTIC’ nearly crushes a guest, the building takes on a rich, tragi-farcical life that has little to do with the thinner air of allegory. (‘I ...”

“... and Plymouth only), ozonic breeze, prisons, estuarine reek, gulls built by Supermarine, piercing light’. Meades’s work is so generous, so rich and so obviously contentious that to mount a critique of it seems churlish. No one else could combine all of the aesthetic and political positions he flexes so aggressively. The enemy of populism and the taste ...”

“... but I thought reform of the Lords might be better achieved by his party.28 April 1996. Derry and Alison Irvine are fellow guests at a dinner party at the Dworkins. The collective rate of encroachment on our hosts’ wine supply is truly awesome. I am reminded of Winston Churchill saying to my father about his – my father’s – teetotal father, who had ...”

“... donations from an all-star roster of American authors, including William Styron, Bellow, Alison Lurie and Gore Vidal; even Irving Howe chipped in. It was thanks to Roth’s entrepreneurship that Penguin launched its Writers from the Other Europe series, which introduced (among others) Milan Kundera, Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Borowski and György Konrád ...”

“... of her fur collar with diamond-encrusted hand. Her lips and eyes are heavy with make-up, and the light that strikes from the top left corner licks folds of fabric and flattens fur. It bounces off her proto-flapper black waves. Todd’s vision lasted only three years. Vogue was losing money, and rapidly. Ms Todd was ‘browsing happily in rich ...”

“... strength. And yet we did nothing but engage in the most harmless, agreeable, typically Russian, light-hearted liberal chatter.’ He is referring to the circle around old Stepan Trofimovich and is saying considerably more than he is aware of saying. To Dostoevsky’s mind, the little circle, in the last analysis, has been pretty much what rumour said, while ...”

“... still known by heart to Scots people are lyrics, not letters. No one, moreover, would want to make light of his valuable activities as a defender of the oral and literate popular tradition in verse, which produced good poems, like ‘The Lass of Ecclefechan’, poems short and sweet, and sour, of which he is the collector as well as, or rather than, the ...”

“... era was cold and dark and bleak, but there was a touch of pink in the east and a sense of the light slowly but steadily strengthening. In 1945, more than 70 per cent of the population was working-class, employed either as rural labourers or industrial workers. Over the next decade, their story would be one of growing prosperity and wellbeing, of widening ...”

“... Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, and explored every entry in The Stanley Kubrick Archives edited by Alison Castle: a 13-pound art-historical tome containing solid articles on every Kubrick film, together with miscellaneous interviews, excerpts from published memoirs and reviews, and photographs taken on and off the set. It may be a close call for ...”

“... RAF drops emergency supplies of the good stuff: And so it was that Jim Crace fell from the sky. Alison Moore and Henry Sutton and Hilary Mantel fell from the sky, Ali Smith and Marcus Mills too. Their books fell from the sky in their thousands, parachuted into parks and on to roundabouts in towns and cities across the barren and would-be suburban land. The ...”

“... entitlement would also have meant that such crimes as he committed would most likely not see the light of day. The priesthood had, as far as he was concerned, solved his problems for him. This is almost an aspect of the Catholic religion itself, this business of knowing and not knowing something all at the same time, keeping an illusion separate from the ...”

“... greedy for plastic columns: white collar criminals, oligarchs’ security apes, footballers, light entertainers and seedy golf pros – the improbable successors to the many yeoman farmers with modest acres who inhabited a county where big landlords and big estates were unusually few. Hence the proximity to each other of the new country houses built on ...”

“... and using a homemade Ouija board all those years, seem positively peasant-like and self-reliant. Alison Lurie recently described Merrill in Connecticut, chatting in his kitchen as he sliced up ‘a ripe red tomato with his little serrated knife’. Roussel, by contrast, did not want any indication that the food on his plate in the carefully controlled world ...”