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“... to congratulate ‘ma Baudelairienne actuelle’ on the central picture, George Went Swimming at Barnes Hole, But It Got Too Cold, which he said he longed to see again. He was too late, however. Mitchell was already back at her studio in Paris.As a young painter she had been part of the New York art scene of the late 1940s; she was a member of The Club and ...”

“... The investment partnership Long-Term Capital Management was set up in 1993 by John Meriwether, previously a successful bond trader and then senior manager at the US investment bank, Salomon Brothers. Meriwether recruited to LTCM, from Salomon and elsewhere, an impressive team of experienced traders and specialists in mathematical finance ...”

“... far foundered on the inability of the Tories to promise Owen and his two remaining SDP colleagues, John Cartwright and Rosie Barnes, a clear run in their constituencies at the next election. So there it is. Although the Sunday Times recently urged John Major to bring fresh blood into his ...”

“... Europe’s ‘plan’ for us was like Hitler’s (Gove also used the Nazi analogy). Along with John Redwood – he of the velveteen disdain (‘That’s a very BBC question,’ he tells Kirsty Wark patronisingly) – Johnson has been a big proponent of the ‘prosecco and cheese’ argument: that the Italians and the French will be so scared of losing the ...”

“... divorce; a parting of ways with his agent Pat Kavanagh and her husband, his great friend, Julian Barnes; the near-death of his mentor Saul Bellow; the discovery that his maternal cousin Lucy Partington, missing since she disappeared without trace in December 1973, had been one of the victims of Fred West. To contemplate this sequence is to see how it might ...”

“... people’, though mostly important ones: the publisher Marguerite Caetani, Peggy Guggenheim, Djuna Barnes. Figures associated with Proust would sometimes be there – Lily de Gramont, the duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, for instance, whom Barney insisted on introducing to Capote (an interest in celebrities was ‘one of her hang-ups’). Many were queer ...”

“... Madame Bovary: some translations need as long as the book itself took to write, a few even longer. John Rutherford’s magisterial version of Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta – a kind of Spanish Bovary – cost him, according to his calculation, five times as many hours to translate as it had taken Alas to write. ‘Translation is a strange ...”

“... procedures. Also about painters he admires (Titian, Rembrandt, Velásquez, Ingres, Matisse, Gwen John) and those he doesn’t: da Vinci (‘Someone should write a book about what a bad painter Leonardo da Vinci was’), Raphael and Picasso. He prefers Chardin to Vermeer, and dismisses Rossetti so violently as to induce pity. He is not just ‘the worst of ...”

“... in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth Network, which, since its founding in 1986 in Louvain, has been the main body studying and advocating for ...”

“... relationship to their creator as Rabbit – a kind of clownish, dimmer alter ego – does to John Updike. Bouvard and Pécuchet, who start the novel looking as if they are to be satirical butts, end it as deranged comic heroes, sub-Quixotic failures in their own heroic if absurd quest.Not Too Slow, Not Too FastFlaubert is famous for his ...”

“... Some​ of M. John Harrison’s books have aliens in and carry endorsements from China Miéville; others are alien-free and endorsed by Robert Macfarlane. He has fans who’ve read all the science fiction but not Climbers (1989), his semi-autobiographical masterpiece about rock climbing in the North of England, and fans who are effusive about Climbers but won’t go near the sci-fi ...”

“... ends up with a philosophy of his own which is no less arbitrary and coercive than the rest. Barnes: Kuhn’s attack on the ‘rationalist’ account of science owes its influence to being wrongly held to imply that scientific progress is anything which a community of scientists asserts to be so – which Kuhn himself doesn’t believe at ...”

“... rants (trashing the proles), small revenges. The Modernist experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations ...”

“... Boers’ spy in the town, reporting to the ‘Irish Brigade’ in the Boer Army which was led by John MacBride (the husband of Maud Gonne; I assume Kiernan is the novelist’s creation). Kiernan has two feisty daughters, Bella and Jane, who supply the romantic subplots very efficiently. Bella will ingeniously escape the siege with her Portuguese hairdresser ...”

“... Lucas and Clement map out a distinct social territory. It lies in pockets of Hampstead and Barnes, in Oxford north of St Giles or on Boar’s Hill, where large families live in rambling old houses full of innocent laughter and fun, and favourite aunts and uncles and friends of the family come for lunch on Sunday, and amiable dogs bound about answering ...”