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“... know,’ as if mention of the Buchan title was the best he could do to suggest a highly elusive brand of sensibility. His view seemed to be that of most of the Continental jurors, who awarded the prize, quite a prestigious one in those days, to the Italian novelist Gadda for A Horrible Mess on Via Merulana. I am sure they were right, but The Fox in the ...”

“... ami, I did not write because I was beastly seedy – nerve trouble – a taste of hell.’ To William Blackwood, 12 April 1900: ‘A dog’s life! this writing out, this endlessness of effort and this endless discontent; with remorse, thrown in, for the massacre of so many good intentions.’ To Edward Garnett, 29 March 1898: ‘I assure you – speaking ...”

“... boroughs into the Chiltern Hundreds and the Vale of Aylesbury. The originators of successful brand names deserve to be remembered. According to Alan Jackson’s London’s Metropolitan Railway (1986), the name Metroland was the inspiration of James Garland, a copywriter in the company’s publicity department, who was laid up with flu but leapt out of ...”

“... of the cuts and the rise in university tuition fees then conveniently destroyed the Lib Dem brand and any threat it might have posed to the Conservative electoral juggernaut at the 2015 election. Nick Clegg and David Laws would have done better to reflect on the lessons of the 1880s. If free-market pro-EU Liberals had fought the 2015 election as a small ...”

“... remembers that there was lax discipline among them. There was also friction between Lieutenant William ‘Rusty’ Calley, the only man to serve time for My Lai, and the company’s commanding officer, Captain Ernest Medina, even though the two shared a violent animosity towards the Vietnamese. Within a few weeks of arriving in Asia, both were involved in ...”

“... only friend Achak is surprisingly reunited with. His two best friends from Marial Bai, Moses and William K., both of whom he believes to be dead, cross his path again: William K. a few weeks after leaving Marial Bai; Moses at Pinyudo. Moses was not killed by the murahaleen, as Achak believed, but taken captive and sold ...”

“... who are pushing him to enact his fantasy of being a standard-bearer for reformed racists turned brand ambassadors for what is right, what is fair and being Really Sorry about the Past. He has every right to be angry. People have been falling over themselves to say what a decent cove the king is, but what father – despite a lifetime of kowtowing to his ...”

“... chairs with the Nazis (and letting them win) seems almost too perfect an image for the particular brand of appeasement Astor and her ‘Cliveden set’ embraced. Cliveden in Buckinghamshire had been given to Nancy and her husband Waldorf as a wedding present by his father, William Waldorf Astor, who had called it ‘the ...”

“... the same point in a letter about A Handful of Dust. Yet he was the first to see that Waugh’s brand of realism in fact depends on a rather cosy kind of fantasy, verging on self-parody in Scoop, where William Boot of Boot Magna Hall, and his column ‘Lush Places’ in the Daily Beast, bear an odd resemblance to the ...”

“... may have been recognised. Whatever else I do in the morning I must inspect the Burrell Collection. Brand-new and some miles away in a park. ‘Get as near as possible,’ I told the taxi driver: ‘I always fall down in snow.’ We parked on concrete and instantly a young man hurried from the massive doorway. ‘Good,’ I told myself, ‘I am expected.’ But ...”

“... Preface goes to ‘King Finow of Tonga’. Finau’s words were spoken to a beachcomber, William Mariner, who had written his name down on a piece of paper as ‘Feenow’. Another beachcomber read it out loud. Finau snatched the paper, looking for himself. ‘This is neither like myself nor anybody else. Where are my eyes, where is my head? Where ...”

“... it was not so much of women as of the lower orders, male as well as female. The Tudor physician William Bullein noted that ‘plain people in the country, as carters, threshers, ditchers, colliers and ploughmen use seldom times to wash their hands, as appeareth by their filthiness, and very few times comb their heads, as is seen by flocks [tufts of ...”

“... once seen shuffling down the Lane with a carrier-bag containing six ‘author’s copies’ of his brand-new ‘breakthrough’ novel. When quizzed, he said he wanted to celebrate publication day ‘in style’. Each of these yarns, it seems to me, could be gruesomely fleshed out by the author of my new New Grub Street. And if he cares to get in touch, I can ...”

“... scar. How can the celebrity outsider maintain a sense of his identity, or painterly authority, when he is his own subject-matter and his audience sees that subject-matter as ‘other’, less than ‘us’? Basquiat’s solutions to this dilemma are often brilliant. In the triptych Zydeco (1984), for example, a cinematographer in profile looks through the lens of his movie camera ...”

“... relations to her friendship with Graham Greene and her love affair with Naples. In 1961, William Maxwell accepted the first story she submitted to the New Yorker, the fragrant, Elizabeth Bishop-like ‘Woollahra Road’. She published two collections: Cliffs of Fall (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). The latter – a series of linked stories ...”