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“... don’t go in for close reading. Whereas non-theoretical critics are faithful to the words on the page, theorists see only what their pet doctrines allow them to see. Like the belief that Edmund Burke was a reactionary or that an extraordinary number of male Australians are called Bruce, this is now such a received idea ...”

“... co-star on two films including Macao – the film which prompted Howard Hughes to write a multi-page memo on the subject of her breasts – was asked to choose her favourite Mitchum film, she said: ‘I just like . . . Robert Mitchum movies.’ It’s a sentiment many film-watchers have shared, and one Mitchum would have loved, while pretending not to.Steve ...”

“... editor of the New Statesman who also wrote on Rhodesia and was (reportedly) forced out under Bruce Page’s politicised programme for the paper. But then, in another part of the narrative, we learn that Stern is writing a series of long obituary articles on Sartre for the New Statesman. David Caute, as I recall, wrote these articles. To what extent ...”

“... Hotel prose captures life after the stiff, etherising drink has been downed. Here is the critic Bruce Hainley, writing in December 1996’s Artforum, on Didion and hotels: My interest in [Didion’s heroine] and her hotel life, a state of mind, has little to do with some misguided romantic notion of living such a life myself. But I find sense and a kind of ...”

“... relation (here the discussants are Lewis, Smart and Suppes). There is one rather strange three-page piece by Dan Bennett on pride. Davidson gets to reply to each paper at the end of the volume, and a new paper by him called ‘Adverbs of Action’ has been included. Before commenting on these various contributions it is as well to remind oneself of ...”

“... Words (1954), continuing happily into a second edition (1973) under the urbane guardianship of Sir Bruce Fraser; and here it is afresh, deftly revised, with much tact and adroit editorial craft, by Sidney Greenbaum and Janet Whitcut. ‘With this third edition,’ we are told, ‘it has become difficult to enumerate the precise contributions of ...”

“... and Batman’s deep whiteness that establishes Spider-Man’s metaphoric blackness. Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne live in palaces of privilege and operate from fantasy cities, Metropolis and Gotham, while working-class Spider-Man is a bridge-and-tunnel person, from Queens, in the real New York. Spider-Man’s good intentions get misrepresented in the media, and ...”

“... pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an apparatus of dates and dimensions. The cover design of the book is not drawn from the works on display in the show but was produced for the book by a design company. It is as vivid and arresting as the ...”

“... see it – a little heave of the shapeless body as he evokes the memory of his dizzy speed. On the page, it is impossible to savour Sandy’s eloquent silence.‘So, Beryl and I went to bed.’ On stage, his eyeballs slowly pop and then roll slightly upwards after that line, telling you all you need to know about the hectic love-life of Sandy and Beryl. (Not ...”

“... is identifiable only by the colour of its endpapers, or by the presence of a date on the title-page or verso. Joseph Connolly, who caters for bibliomaniacs of all kinds, has produced a useful and ebullient guide to children’s modern first editions. He’s perhaps not so sound an assessor of girls’ as he is of boys’ writers, leaving out, for ...”

“... memoir, My Last Sigh; Werner Herzog’s hilarious confabulation, Conquest of the Useless; and Bruce Robinson’s farcical Künstlerroman, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman. However, I’m not so sure Cronenberg’s filmic output is equal to that of Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras or Peter Handke. Part of the problem with creative polymaths is that on ...”

“... gets out of hand. It is with a throb of misgiving that we encounter, on the book’s second page, a table detailing the 12 varieties of typeface employed in the Blackwood’s printing office in 1879. You get the feeling that, if he knew a little less about his subject, David Finkelstein might have written a better book. After ten years sifting the ...”

“... Prime Minister’, ‘Pigeon’), but somehow atypical; her standard length is a full page and upwards, say thirty to fifty lines – pace the author, more like a medium-haul engine. So I eye up a passage in a longer poem, and before long I neither know where to stop nor where to begin. I go on to another one. Same deal. A review – a ...”

“... Bruce Sterling’s 1998 political thriller, Distraction, is set in the year 2044, and roving bands of land-based pirates have taken over the American hinterlands, swamps and roadways, armed with smoke bombs, high-frequency magnets (for scrambling computers) and superglue. The army is bankrupt, and the police force is disabled by corruption and general ineptitude ...”

“... brand names and sweet lost objects (we come across Peek Freans, and Fray Bentos, and Quink, and Bruce Forsyth, and Flanders and Swann); the gay coming-of-age novel and memoir; and the English boarding-school novel. When John Cromer gets to the Vulcan School, the details are those you would expect in any familiar all-male report: beatings, school slang (the ...”