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“... A novel is different. A novel is a bicycle, and readers must pedal. The recent film version of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas gave a vivid demonstration, almost a bullet-point presentation, of how differently narrative works in the two media. The book presents the reader with a number of openings, which break off without explanation. Readers who ...”

“... Tofting and Gravesen look so alike, and so thuggish, that they have been compared to the Mitchell brothers in Eastenders. In the afternoon we go to a wedding in Covent Garden. The whole area is full of pissed-up England fans, all of them happy, but in a loud and drunk and aggressively extrovert way which does not feel all that far removed from ...”

“... and that the offender would be sacked. That’s the language of the new Fleet Street tycoons. David Astor, the former editor of the Observer, wrote in a letter to the Times: ‘To allow a newspaper catering to political sector X of our community to be taken over by a proprietor who is a militant member of political sector Y is, plainly, not in the ...”

“... is impressive, especially the American delegation: the dancers and choreographers Arthur Mitchell, Alvin Ailey and Katherine Dunham; the musicians Duke Ellington and Marion Williams; the writers Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka. Senghor’s friend Césaire made an appearance, as did the Barbadian writer George Lamming, the South African writer ...”

“... listener at home, alone in his room. Further books are scheduled in the series: on Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Björk. Each of these musicians is a virtuoso of one or another aspect of pop. Yet the first book to appear, by Richard Witts, tackles the Velvet Underground. The Velvet Underground were decidedly not these kinds of virtuoso. There are confirmed music ...”

“... all with strong ties to entrepreneurial companies; the Democratic Senate majority leader, George Mitchell; the two heads of the Senate budget committee, James Sasser and Paul Sarbanes; and, as an apparent afterthought, one of Bourke’s summer neighbours, David Rockefeller. Getting wind of the commercial initiative, the ...”

“... diplomats have all called on Thein Sein. Each has returned cautious, but unmistakably impressed. David Cameron, who this week became the most important visitor so far, urged us all to ‘pay tribute … to the leadership of President Thein Sein and his government, which has been prepared to release political prisoners, hold by-elections and legalise ...”

“... They deal in euphemism, and everybody understands them too. Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Mitchell McLaughlin love the phrase ‘the peace process’ and they use it over and over again. In Northern Ireland, if you ignore the punishment beatings, peace has broken out. To keep calling it a ‘process’ is to suggest that it might end, and since the ...”

“... there is, inevitably, some talk of Beckett’s extra-marital amours, notably with Pamela Mitchell and Barbara Bray. It is admirably free of the gossipy and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the frankly ...”

“... her and forced her into his car. Its remit has now been expanded: it will also look at how David Carrick, nicknamed ‘Bastard Dave’ by his colleagues in the Met, raped and sexually assaulted at least twelve women over a period of seventeen years without being prosecuted. The Casey report into ‘standards and culture’ at the Met, prompted by the ...”

“... eyes two great tears rolled, like stones, and he died’) I thought sadder than anything in Joni Mitchell or Leonard Cohen. I was also interested in Thomas Kinsella’s ‘Another September’, because I knew the house just outside Enniscorthy where it was set and I had met the poet’s wife, whose sleeping figure was evoked in the poem. What was most ...”

“... Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or ...”

“... and donors complained about his tweets criticising Israel. The billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have donated huge sums to advance their project of converting university students to free-market fundamentalism and then placing them in positions of political power. At the College of Charleston in South Carolina, Koch money was donated on the ...”

“... blue-framed glasses, floppy dyed-blonde locks and middle-aged paunch, I was beginning to resemble David Hockney. But she has become a lot less dangerous overall. I take advantage of her inattention and quiz Blakey under my breath: Do you think I look like a MAN? B. gives me an appraising glance but is non-committal. Then everything lands on our table in a ...”

“... other people became stalwarts of a kind, didn’t they? Hugo Williams?Oh, they came in. David Harsent was another.Peter Dale?I think we published some of his poems. He never became quite one of the gang. There was a certain amount of indecision about him then. David Harsent appeared from nowhere. I think via the ...”