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“... poems, splendid though they may be, are in need of corrective piss-taking and don’t carry the weight that ‘any novel does’. After his death, in 1995, Amis took less of a battering than Larkin had. Martin Amis’s Experience (2000) softened the prevailing image of him as the meanest drunk at the Garrick, and Zachary Leader’s biography wasn’t ...”

“... The greatest story since the Resurrection was how Mencken described the 1935 trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann for the kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby. Among the three hundred-odd reporters present, besides Mencken, were Damon Runyon, Ford Madox Ford, Edna Ferber, Alexander Woollcott, Heywood Broun, Walter Winchell and Joseph Alsop, who was required to write no less than ten thousand words a day for the Herald Tribune ...”

“... Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant Truth Society. The printer Richard Pynson worked from here; the black-letter colophon to his A ful deuout and gostely treatyse of the imytacion and folowynge the blessed lyfe of oure moste mercyfull sauyoure cryste (1517) declares: ‘This boke Inprinted at London in Fletestrete at the ...”

“... of Christian stunt women, Christian tee-shirt salesmen, Christian heavy metallists, Christian weight-watchers and Christian bikers – people whose lives affirm that consumer preferences can become the channels of divine grace. Of the two authors, Kennedy has the sharper eye for the ironies of free-market religion, for cases like that of the Manhattan ...”

“... the respect for working-class values which he associates with the work of Williams, Young and Richard Hoggart, and before that of D.H. Lawrence, and which would appear here to have followed on a spell of postwar indifference. The working class is thought by these writers to be marked by a power of sympathy, of closeness and attachment, which makes them ...”

“... located an unexpected number of archival documents. The result is a book that, groaning under the weight of quotations from primary sources, often reads like a parody of an old-style thèse d’état. Cordier’s neo-positivist approach contrasts oddly with the work of younger historians, who tend to be more concerned with memory and representation than with ...”

“... Richard Rogers’s new Lloyd’s building in London has begun business, to predictable complaints. A Guardian journalist asking for off-the-cuff comments from underwriters found them grumpy – the only appreciative voice was foreign and female. That is not surprising: the new Lloyd’s is an architectural statement of un-English vehemence ...”

“... Richard Yates faced some formidable obstacles: a broken home, tuberculosis, rampant alcoholism, divorce (twice), lack of recognition and manic depression – a combination that sent him, as he put it, ‘in and out of bughouses’. Even his triumphs seemed only to cause further distress. Though his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961), was a critical success, sales were wretched, and he spent most of his working life in its shadow ...”

“... each and tells us that ‘the raging sea boils.’ You could say that, and you could also say, as Richard Taylor does in his book on the film, that Eisenstein is showing us what moving pictures alone can do by way of representing reality, is remembering all the shifting, unfaked water in the work of the Lumière Brothers, for example. Or you could just watch ...”

“... in a letter to Murray III about Samuel Wilberforce’s hostile review of Origin of Species is Richard Owen, the palaeontologist who coined the word ‘dinosaur’, and who disagreed with Darwin about the transmutation of species. Hooker’s suggestion that Wilberforce, who is too often cast as merely a bigoted reactionary, had been ‘made a tool of’ by ...”

“... repeats the familiar story that Essex’s supporters commissioned a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard II just before the abortive coup, without addressing Blair Worden’s arguments in the LRB of 10 July 2003 that the play in question was not Shakespeare’s at all). Shapiro then glances at the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, and ...”

“... Richard Ford’s narrator, Frank Bascombe, quit serious writing to become a sports-writer. This was the making of Ford. It wasn’t until he became Bascombe, the sportswriter, that Ford turned himself into a major novelist. At odd moments in The Sportswriter, Frank looks back on his abandoned literary career. He had published a ‘promising’ collection of stories, Blue Autumn, and had then started on a novel which he never finished ...”

“... within it – and with a sense of humour entirely lacking in historical novelists.’ In London, Richard Ollard, an editor at Macmillan, was similarly impressed by O’Brian’s ‘originality, gusto and … really astonishing knowledge of the sources’. He was ‘a more than competent hand at characterisation’, Ollard, a former navy ...”

“... There is already a lot of biographical writing about Orwell, including the memoir of Richard Rees and The Unknown Orwell by William Abrahams and Peter Stansky (lamed by the late Soni Orwell’s refusal of permission to quote), and, more recently, the expansive Life by Bernard Crick, at first authorised by the widow to emphasise her rejection of Stansky and Abrahams, and later de-authorised by her to indicate disapproval of Crick, who, much to her annoyance, had lawyers good enough to ensure that he was able to publish it anyway, quotations and all ...”

“... of Ireland are therefore of particular significance in connection with the new initiative. In the Richard Dimbleby Lecture, under the title ‘Irish Identities’, he developed an approach to the problem more complex than that of any earlier nationalist leader. At the same time, he made very explicit his belief that ‘ultimately there has to be a ...”