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“... City, inscribed for Carolyn by way of apology, after a bad boy’s night, a stand-up row with a black girl, sulks in the attic. Here was that book, as well as a copy of On the Road that showed clear evidence of having been thoroughly invigilated, and bearing, at the head of the fixed endpaper, Neal Cassady’s neat signature. Verification that any reputable ...”

“... smile to herself and sit back again.’ When George’s daughter Anne was born in 1919 and son Michael in 1921, the sisters became enthusiastic babysitters and general chroniclers of their brother’s household. ‘I think George enjoys the thrill she gets when she gives her name in shops,’ Lolly wrote. ‘Mrs W.B. Yeats.’ Lily thought her ...”

“... fractious era. No global hullabaloo of youth culture: impossible to imagine Altamont or Live Aid, Michael Jackson on the Thames, Bono cold calling George Bush mid-gig, Katy Perry in orbit. No personal touchscreen beckoning itchy fingers. Just gazing dreamily into the distance or cycling about aimlessly on long summer afternoons. Boredom and its cloud-drift ...”

“... Day at Honda’ has an explicitly able-bodied protagonist, while Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is famously one-armed. All Norden can think of to say is that Tracy’s character is ‘“remasculated” through his heroic deeds’. Since when was he demasculated? He looks pretty tough from the word go (even Norden describes him as ‘a ...”

“... males. These could be the men of her own party, as when she notes how hopeless Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine were when they accompanied her on a visit to Reagan in 1985. ‘I did not bring them again,’ she remarks, for all the world as though they were a couple of incontinent pet dogs. But foreign statesmen could fare little better. That same ...”

“... crew), and during rehearsals is beaten up and raped by a monstrously endowed Madagascan convict, Black Caesar. All these are problems. But the chief obstacle to Mary’s cohabiting with Clark is modesty. She has tattooed on her backside the message, ‘Andrew Hilton I love thee to the grave’, Hilton being her former London fence. This embarrassment is ...”

“... their father at weekends in happier days singing “Onward Christian Soldiers”, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” and “John Brown’s body lies a mould’ring in the grave” – there were now ominous pools of blood.’ And she will grasp at anything to try and make things look better for John. The Coroner had asked: ‘Would an instinctive ...”

“... they brought it out of the pit where it had cooked all day. The pig had been on a stick, sagging black, falling apart. Under Annie’s sharp regime, Sheldon actually contrives to produce in ‘Misery’s Return’ what he recognises as the best instalment of the saga. Nurse, it would seem, knows best. In the inevitably gory climax Sheldon turns the ...”

“... Hubert Bland was very big and very vain. The son of a Woolwich clerk, he sported a top hat, a black-ribboned monocle, and an aggressively argumentative manner. When his wife wanted to make sure he saw a message she would prop it in the frame of a looking-glass (Julia Briggs deposits this information in a footnote, as she does other sprightly ...”

“... significantly from the temporary release of the Balcombe Street IRA gang and the Loyalist killer Michael Stone. I remember die Kipling story, ‘The Village that Voted the Earth Was Flat’. I fear the flat-earthers and can’t be sure. Outside the headquarters of the Ulster Democratic Party (associated with the UDA) – a narrow converted shop on the ...”

“... The main vehicle for all of this was the Congress for Cultural Freedom, ‘run by CIA agent Michael Josselson from 1950 till 1967’. My first encounter (pun unintended) with the Congress was through The God that Failed, a compendium of confessions by well-known former Communists (and/or sympathisers) that included Gide, Silone and Koestler; it was ...”

“... Polish orphanages after the Armistice, the child psychologist Margaret Lowenfeld wrote that ‘the black misery of prisoners of war is very like the depressions of infancy.’ The study of the adult mind disordered by war helped encourage a fuller elaboration of the psychic life of the child, which itself seemed to be characterised by disturbance and the ...”

“... must try to recapture the visual impact of his architecture by different routes: through grainy black and white photographs taken prior to demolition; through Soane’s own sketches and plans (though how far these represent what was actually built is often unclear); and, especially, through the extraordinary perspective drawings and watercolours of the ...”

“... previously isolated communities were threaded into a network in the years around 1900, notably by Black rubber tappers who encountered ayahuasca in the forest and adapted its use for Christian worship in the cities, did the secret of macerating and boiling together a specific combination of plants to produce a brew for oral consumption spread across the ...”

“... Even when he was elected to the Senate at the age of thirty Biden hadn’t got into the black. In What It Takes (1992), a breathless work of campaign stenography, Richard Ben Cramer described the confession Biden made to his aides before deciding to run: ‘The debts – he went through his finances whole, the mortgages, the credit cards. He was ...”