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“... theatre and we may remember that there was a Drury Lane pantomime called Merlin: or, the Devil of Stone-Henge in 1734, just two years before, and the plot is not unlike Jones’s report of Fanny’s story. John Fowles’s way of blending history and mystery has exercised several academic critics. Is his technique ancient or modern, dated or novel? In A Maggot ...”

“... the accumulation of archival bricks, but for the grand architectural design: his philosopher’s stone has always been the insight which makes sense of a mass of material already collected. The method carries the risk, of course, that it may come to seem a little old-fashioned. This is not just a matter of changing intellectual fashions, though as a ...”

“... by other statues with feet (if they still had them) tied to stones, and whose knuckles of stone knocked on his walls.’ It’s disappointing, somehow, to read a couple of sentences later: ‘The child now wished to live as though he’d drowned.’ Wasn’t that obvious already, the memory palace under water, the feet ‘(if they still had ...”

“... sentimentality. I can imagine having the Oscar Wilde response – ‘one must have a heart of stone’ to read it and not laugh – but I went for it. The room, saturated with love, mirrored the many holidays and weekends we had all spent together over the years. I stroked Paul’s hair, whispering: ‘You’re a brave Paladin’ – my nickname for him ...”

“... noisy advertising. In front of them some violent encounters of the sort familiar to Mr Jingle and Oliver Twist are being enacted. The print implies that cultural institutions, especially the new National Gallery, are detached from the sordid realities of urban life. The Royal Academy moved into the east wing of Wilkins’s building in 1837 while the National ...”

“... of class and sex. Alger Hiss was not exactly a patrician but he had been a law clerk for Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes; he had been one of the bright boys of the Roosevelt New Deal and he had been energetic and instrumental in setting up two of the pillars of the postwar liberal American imperial order – the United Nations and the Carnegie Endowment for ...”

“... lovely shoulders, ‘cheekbones like a Russian’ and a cat called Nancy Mitford, who ‘fell two stone storeys’ from her bedroom window on Margaret’s 30th birthday; her bag held tranquillisers, cigarettes, sunglasses with a ‘pussycat slant’. Her first longed-for copy of Elle arrived from France the week after she killed herself. How else to write ...”

“... and most reviewers agreed with them. She always had a small circle of devotees – the producer Oliver Smith commissioned her to write a play that year, and kept giving her money over the decade it took her to finish it. But the general incomprehension and dismissal discouraged her, and when asked for a new story for an anthology she claimed she had nothing ...”

“... a race, the first man home – except for Iain Banks who won the trophy by a mile – would be Oliver Sacks (announced 19 February – died 30 August), with Henning Mankell (announced 17 January – died 5 October) a close second. Lisa Jardine won a race of her own, staying shtum publicly, her death a surprise except to the few who knew. So Clive James ...”

“... homes, and she disappeared for a while behind their closed ranks.As usual, she went first to Ethel Oliver. The Professor had retired from his curatorship at Kew, and the family were now at 2 The Grove, Isleworth. Here Charlotte’s desire was not to be any kind of a celebrity. But the quiet suburb was not altogether safe. Lady Ottoline Morrell called, with the ...”

“... to find larger readerships. Thus Ascherson joins the oddly-assorted, lively company of Primo Levi, Oliver Sacks, John Berger, Edward Said and Germaine Greer – but from a slippery starting-point: the journalist is a specialist in nothing. Sometimes he seems to know that only too well, and to underrate his own contribution. Calling for work on the growing ...”

“... hoor with a range of examples from the writings of Patrick Kavanagh, Brian Friel, Tim Pat Coogan, Oliver St John Gogarty, Neil Jordan and Hugh Leonard. It’s a method that seems to be at once academically sound and, for those committed to a long weekend in England and Wales carrying only one bag and one book, perfect for a bit of one-way crack, or ...”

“... or an obsessively meticulous rendering of an obsessively meticulous New Yorker cover by Jenny Oliver – or most common of all, a confession. In those days, the New Yorker was also a kind of Miss Lonelyhearts. At first, I had thought that the woman was one of those people, and in a way you could say she had become one. The receptionist told me her ...”

“... coronaria by the back gate, and in our prolonged absence this summer it has seeded itself in the stone trough by the back door, with a lone outpost in a crack between the paving stones. I love its piercing pink, first seen, a whole bed of it, round a tree in the garden of Great Chalfield Manor, a National Trust house in Wiltshire. When I inquired for it at a ...”

“... not begin with ‘Sunday Morning’, but Jonathan Barker suggests that Ron Butlin, James Lasdun, Oliver Reynolds and other talents have been influenced, like Vendler’s Americans, by the world of Canon Aspirin. This seems doubtful. To read the PBS volume after the Faber Book is to be almost crushed by the pressure of social detail. It is to enter a ...”