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“... The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy, which is illustrated with drawings of the elegant squiggles skaters were supposed to leave on the ice: ‘Only in a certain type of dream,’ Jones wrote, offering a clue to his other area of expertise, ‘do we ever else attain a higher degree of the same ravishing experience of exultantly skiing the earth ...”

“... North Korean Economic Policy and Blank: 300 Empty Pages to Fill with Your Own Fucking Theories. James Harkin’s Niche: Why the Market No Longer Favours the Mainstream (Little, Brown, £13.99) puts forward the hypothesis that between the 1930s and the end of the 20th century in ‘retail, media and politics’ in North America and Western Europe there was ...”

“... just over the Canadian border. But then there’s Laura’s other, secret boyfriend, James Hurley, a motorbike-riding loner, but also one of the Bookhouse Boys, a vigilante outfit whose members include Sheriff Truman. Agent Cooper is not only a paragon of rational deduction with a weakness for damn fine black coffee and fresh cherry pie: he’s ...”

“... Edward Jones – the Burne came later – was born in Birmingham to a mother who died giving birth to him and a father who eked out a living as a frame-maker, although art, his son reported, ‘was always a great bewilderment to him’. The only person who seems to have recognised the boy’s talent – a neighbour who bought pictures to rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner ...”

“... In the introduction to Almost like a Whale, Steve Jones calls The Origin of Species ‘without doubt, the book of the millennium’. Jones is an evolutionary biologist, so this judgment could merely reflect disciplinary bias. But not only did The Origin of Species disabuse us of the notion that we humans are in some way set apart from the natural world, it also provided a mechanism, natural selection, to explain how the exquisite fit of organisms to their environment can arise without divine intervention: man deposed, God disposed of, and all in a single volume ...”

“... dinners’ were being held, at first under the auspices of Butler’s great friend Henry Festing Jones (the last dinner was in July 1914), and Forster was offered £25 by his publisher as an advance for a book about Butler. Lytton Strachey, who also found Butler immensely ‘cheering’, wanted to write on him in the Edinburgh Review; and Forster, who ...”

“... Celtic Studies, or Celticism, has rarely been disinterested. In 1884 one James Cruikshank Roger published Celticism: A Myth. The title was ‘intended to express’ his ‘conviction that the assumption of Celtic civilisation and Celtic art is utterly without foundation’. Encouraged by the press reception, Roger showed his hand in the second edition: ‘Let him who will, deduce his origin from the shiftless savage of the British isles, I am content to believe myself of that great Teutonic stock, which has ruled the world in the past, and will rule it to the end of time ...”

“... The Hazlitt of our time’, said the Manchester Guardian, announcing the death of James Agate in 1947. An extravagant compliment, but the famous theatre reviewer did have one or two of Hazlitt’s characteristics. Though his journalism now seems too pompous-frivolous even for the theatre world, his reports of actors’ performances are often vivid and persuasive: he was quite learned in his subject and could communicate his own enthusiasm, making drama seem important – more important, perhaps, than it seems to us today ...”

“... James Wilcox’s charming comedy is set in rural Louisiana, among people who read the Bible in an engagingly amateurish way, associating religion with the conventions about drinking and dancing enforced by their anxious parents, and sometimes tempted to ‘modernise’ their lives, while still seeking God’s guidance ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... absurdity, Anthony Burgess’s 29th novel, we turn to Stanley Middleton’s 25th and Mervyn Jones’s 22nd, both of them rather dour books concerned with an ‘older’ man renewing acquaintance with his first love. ‘Older’ is by no means a precise term; the hero of An After-Dinner’s Sleep was born in 1918, like Ellen Henshaw, but at 65 he feels ...”

“... inescapable defeat Flat out in a first-class reclining seat? You heard the reaper in the Brynmor Jones Library cough behind your swivel chair. I had to hear those crocodiles crunch bones, Like cars compressed for scrap, before the hair Left on my head stood straight up in the air. You saw it all in little. You dug deep. A lesser man needs coarser ...”

“... a spade a spade’, against the local vicar’s advice. Witter Bynner is a more wily bird. James Kraft’s selection of his letters presents him in a good light and few would claim to ‘see through’ him, as we think we see through Neville. Bynner’s comments on The Plumed Serpent seem just and gentlemanly. He challenges, without malice, the tone of ...”

“... Everyone​  knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”

“... brandishing growth in itself as a solution to this problem should be asked: for whom?Listen to James Butler discuss this piece with Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite and Thomas Jones on the LRB ...”