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“... than his aesthetician critic. The back jacket of the Intelligent Person’s Guide displays a full-page photograph of the author, in his tanned, coiffed and open-necked glory. He could model for Michelangelo. Since REM’s 1995 Monster tour, Stipe, once as elfinly beautiful as the young Truman Capote, has affected a shaven-headed, emaciated look. Scurrilous ...”

“... by Ronald Knox, one of the ‘wider reading’ books I swotted up for my scholarship. Remembering Bruce MacFarlane was at Dulwich, I wander into Charles Barry’s huge hammerbeam hall, the walls lined with honours boards of distinctions at Oxford and Cambridge chiefly; though there’s some mention of the Army and the Indian Civil Service, there is none of ...”

“... with dictionary-highbrow. Buthlay’s edition prints the text of A Drunk Man on the left-hand page and many of its source materials on right-hand pages. This arrangement allows us to see clearly how MacDiarmid in the poem achieves choral, typically Modernist effects. A good instance is seen when Buthlay places a verse of MacDiarmid’s host-text (an ...”

“... and other more or less public figures who are ordinarily assured a place on the obituary page continue to appear there. The full page of photographs and memorials is for the firefighters, window-cleaners, janitors and waiters whose lives and deaths would normally have gone unrecorded by the most widely circulated ...”

“... Bodleian Library’s Abinger Collection. Robinson describes how he and the specialist librarian Bruce Barker-Benfield painstakingly reconstructed the disbound notebooks containing most of the Draft and part of the Fair Copy of Frankenstein, ‘by inspecting each leaf of the manuscript and by attending to torn edges, glue residue, ink blots, pin ...”

“... of ‘the strange and the beautiful’ – plays a large role in his depictions of himself on the page. His books turn on the encounter between the energetic yet dreamy narrator, moving ‘in a boyish euphoria of self-sufficiency’, as he puts it in Behind the Wall: A Journey through China, and the sometimes deflating realities he finds. Once these have made ...”

“... Land as brooding upon the spiritual vacancy of Man without God is to read what is there on the page, whereas to view it as a symptom of an exhausted bourgeois civilisation in an era of imperialist warfare is to impose your own crankish theory on the poem.’ It’s a caricature – theoretical Eagleton turns out to be fonder of crude binarisms than the ...”

“... place to have made it was Court Number Two, where he would have been open to cross-examination by Bruce Laughland, Ponting’s lawyer. By not doing this, Michael Heseltine has earned himself a black mark in important Conservative circles, where, when it comes to the leadership stakes, it will be taken into account that he did not behave as an officer and a ...”

“... secret police and firing squads. In April Reader’s Digest followed up with a twenty-page ‘condensation’ which left a lot out but made room for the suggestion that socialism is incompatible with Christianity – a claim that Hayek, an unwavering non-believer, would never have made.Hayek was crossing the Atlantic, under radio silence, when the ...”

“... in health, literally’, a phrase whose wedding-vow echoes she seems not to notice. On the same page, she points out that despite my middle name, I am not related to my famous subject. Once, it’s true, when we were both at dinner with a group of friends, someone asked about a possible familial connection, and Roth turned to me with a look of mild horror ...”

“... by sending an emoticon: :-) smiley face :-( frowney face :-) half-smiley :-/ wry face (turn the page sideways). Many hacker terms have double meanings, depending on context: for example, for the rest of us (from Apple Computer’s slogan advertising the Macintosh) can describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames the competition, or (used ...”

“... Lowe tells us, was never even begun? Many dons, of course, regard publication as incurably vulgar. Bruce McFarlane, a fellow of All Souls before becoming the history tutor at Magdalen, knew more about the late Middle Ages than anyone alive, but could not translate any of his knowledge into books. Sparrow might have liked to be such a man, but he wasn’t Lowe ...”

“... opposite Sean Penn; Osment, b. 1988, is still best known for his role in The Sixth Sense alongside Bruce Willis. But Lin’s characters are not them. ‘Haley Joel Osment’ is a young writer whose life resembles Tao Lin’s; ‘Dakota Fanning’ is a high-school student in New Jersey. Their names may be a comment on the media-saturated culture of contemporary ...”

“... Australia. At which point, they should turn to the poets. For just as the Songlines are, to use Bruce Chatwin’s image, ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” [is] readable’, so the quick and shallow tracks of tourism retrace our oldest myths, revisiting ancient holy sites, seeking out a ...”

“... the idea of Morse code as a way of communicating. And when he finally breaks through, he taps out page after page, affirming the inevitable triumph of the human spirit. The history of the book’s reception is more interesting than the book itself. Because it was serialised in the New York Daily Worker, Trumbo was wrongly ...”