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“... His first sexual fantasy was of lying naked on a battlefield. Such are the images that can speed a young person into prose, living out the reality of a martyred mother and a dead father. His first attempt at authorship was ‘The History of My Friends’, a tiny manuscript he dictated to his mother. It taught him, Bucknell writes, that ‘friendship could be ...”

“... anaesthesia, a very rare psychological condition.’ This ‘doctor’ was presumably one of the young editors. The editorial team of Out of Bounds had a sharp eye for publicity, blazoning across the masthead ‘Banned in Uppingham … Banned in Cheltenham’. But it was an expensive production at a shilling an issue, and short-lived. It would never have ...”

“... of Broch’s or Eliot’s Virgil and, say, a comparison between major English translations from Gavin Douglas and Dryden to today? Dare one even mention how stringently apposite an insight might be won from a contrastive look at the musical apprehension of the Aeneid in Berlioz’s Troyens and in Barraqué’s massive, if incomplete settings of ...”

“... prelude to the West German economic miracle. The occupation is often remembered as the moment when young Germans took to jazz and, like Sollors, aped the casual manner of the American soldiers posted in their country, but it was primarily a time of hunger and misery, as the Germans burrowed into ruins, or joined crowds of ragged DPs trekking across the ...”

“... of the theorist André Bazin. British film studies were still in utero. Lindsay Anderson and Gavin Lambert didn’t start the student magazine Sequence till a year after Great Expectations appeared. Anderson, it goes without saying, despised David Lean. Another energetic hater, Wyndham Lewis, wrote of London in his novel Rotting Hill (1951): ‘a ...”

“... the sad years when so many of London’s traditional Clubs fell under the auctioneer’s hammer. Gavin Stamp stands in waistcoat and fob-watch in ‘the essential profusion of accumulated clutter’ which he has built up in his ‘Standard Late Georgian Fourth Rate London terraced house’ near King’s Cross. Gervase Jackson-Stops, the National Trust’s ...”

“... the World Economic Conference in London, and went with de Jouvenel, Drieu la Rochelle and other young idealists to Berlin for a gruesome attempt at a Franco-German rapprochement. That’s about half of what she did. The writing, quoted here, seems already as concrete, intense and precise as it would ever be. Although she had the self-made woman’s disdain ...”

“... Antiquarian prejudice and ecclesiastical philistinism are in good shape, self-righteous as ever.Gavin Stamp was not of the flock. He was a propagandist, a preservationist, a stern critic and fierce journalist. He was a great historian – evident in his Memorial to the Missing of the Somme (2006) – as well as a great architectural historian. No one else ...”

“... that his first novel is, like many first novels, closely modelled on the author’s life: like the young Michel Houellebecq, the narrator of Whatever works as an IT technician, contracted out to install software at various depressing provincial outposts of the Ministry of Agriculture. What is rather surprising is that at least three of the characters ...”

“... you have (in this political age) The secret of the dishonour of the sage – The one that’s young enough to have some teeth The one that’s suspected honest underneath. Lewis’s own teeth were all on display. Their power came less from their intrinsic sharpness than from the muscles of his jaw. It is in any case in blasting and not in coupleteering ...”

“... two years. He did, in 1508. There is an unimpeachable later paper trail for the London picture – Gavin Hamilton, Lord Lansdowne, the Earl of Suffolk – and there can be no doubt it came from the Immaculate altarpiece. But was it Leonardo who painted it, finally? The London panel is a formidable object, brilliant, ice-cold, entirely conscious of its ...”

“... Everyone is in high spirits. Among those chattering girlishly as spring rolls and won ton arrive: Young but already world-famous deconstructionist literary critic, long involved in a lesbian relationship with an older professor at Yale. Somewhat mannish, chain-smoking medievalist of mysterious inclinations, with whom Famous ...”

“... the first rules is never to offer anything for free. In the New Statesman’s Weekend Competition Gavin Ewart once mistakenly implied that the actor Roland Culver was dead. Mr Culver – whose name had only come up in the first place because it rhymed with ‘vulva’ – threatened to sue for potential loss of earnings. Page refused to let the Weekend ...”

“... out that both she and Harris had started their careers as lawyers representing children and young women who were victims of sexual abuse. The point was driven home by the stories of Hadley Duvall, a Kentucky woman who testified to being raped by her stepfather, and Wanda Kagan, a high-school friend of Harris’s who was taken in by Harris’s family ...”

“... When, in War and Peace, young Nikolai Rostov first rides, into action with his fellow hussars against the French at Austerlitz, he feels that the longed-for time has come ‘to experience the intoxication of a charge’, about which he has heard so much. At first he is indeed elated, but then the unseen enemy suddenly becomes visible, Rostov’s horse is shot under him, there is ‘around him nothing but the still earth and the stubble ...”