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“... the beautiful Phoebe McGrath, who just happens to be picnicking there with her parents, Molly and Jack. Book One of Illywhacker tells of how Herbert develops this encounter into a flourishing epoch of his life, seducing Phoebe, deluding Jack and almost upsetting the delicate balance of Molly McGrath’s mind. Phoebe and ...”

“... shit-covered insects swarm the vehicle. He has found what he was looking for. It is Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It is 1954 in Los Angeles. With Harold Land on tenor and Bud’s younger brother Richie Powell playing piano, George Morrow on bass, they are playing ‘Daahoud’, and playing it as well as it can possibly be played. The Maestro takes a deep ...”

“... Shardlake has a gimlet eye and a sharp mind. His character owes something to Chesterton’s Father Brown, except that where Brown draws on insights into human nature deriving from years in the confessional, Shardlake’s speciality is the sifting and weighing of evidence.Like all the best detectives, Shardlake is also an ...”

“... described and include some good minor characters. Oakes worked on the Army newspaper, the Union Jack, edited by a Major Tarrant who had such a deep reverence for royalty that any king or queen mentioned in its pages had to be given the prefix HM. Defending this typographical clumsiness, Tarrant declared: ‘The world may be going to the bow-wows, but as ...”

“... and a discreetly hidden door leads straight into a speakeasy, with dancing girls, ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ rather than Gounod (some like it hot), and various coffees served under the names of various whiskeys. Or rather the reverse: any whiskey you want as long as you call it coffee. The place is raided, and in this version of the narrative the historical ...”

“... is more instructive and nearer to the nitty, if not indeed the actual gritty. In a letter to Jack Kerouac in April 1952, William Burroughs demanded to know: ‘Is Gore Vidal queer or not?’ Burroughs, who had once been at the same boys’ boarding-school as Vidal, can now slake his curiosity. Or he could have pressed Kerouac himself, as Vidal certainly ...”

“... location, topic or domain is added to the theoretical competence of architecture.’Denise Scott Brown, overlooked co-author of the ham-fisted National Gallery extension (with her much praised husband, Robert Venturi), wrote that ‘architects lost their social concern: the architect as macho evolutionary was succeeded as the architect as dernier cri of the ...”

“... some of them, imagined themselves to be blazing a trail for advanced industrial society. George Brown’s incomes policy and National Plan and, later, the Social Contract were claimed as major socio-economic innovations – British firsts. The Manchu Empire had suffered similar ethnocentric delusions and had published maps which showed it to lie at the ...”

“... it, but that was before we got to the notorious scene in which the camera starts out hovering over Jack Woltz’s pool, climbs into his bedroom, then crawls up his sleeping body, finally pausing at a smear of blood on the top edge of his blanket. At this point, my brother announced that there would be a horse’s head under the blanket. I found it hard to ...”

“... the best metaphors in Victorian fiction when he wrote of ‘coveys of white cups, clustered about brown-hens of teapots’. Surtees was a brilliant user of the language, with an idiom that falls foul of accusations of bad grammar and carelessness, but also possesses the improvisatory variety and boldness of birdsong. He was probably no more licentious in his ...”

“... these words: a coffee cake, with coffee icing and frillies at the rim in a lighter tone of coffee brown, then the top spread over with whipped cream and studded all about with glacé cherries and pecan nuts. It stands on a silver pedestal, as indeed such a noble creation should, and this pedestal is surrounded by plates of small sausage rolls and home-baked ...”

“... umbrellas and fake flies. But Deakin is able to share the depths of the balmy chalk streams with brown trout – ‘no greater connoisseurs of fine fresh water’ – for nothing, together with the pike, water voles and crayfish that become his companions in the bullrush pools. ‘I swam right up to a frog, which eyed me, but didn’t dive or even blink. As ...”

“... I haven’t read it. In the same year Rankin also published another full-length Rebus novel, Strip Jack: it told the story of Gregor Jack, a likable-seeming Scots Labour MP turned over by the tabloids when he is caught in a brothel raid. After Jack’s public humiliation his wife ...”

“... of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government style and culture, the initial effect ...”

“... been an embarrassment for Cameron. Previously, his fiscal policies had hardly been different from Brown’s. His aim was to keep government spending at high levels, especially on health and education, and not to make dangerous promises on tax. He had been firm on that, even in the face of a good deal of unease within his party. What happened cut the ground ...”