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“... it has been used for comic minor characters with no inner life: Thwackum and Square in Tom Jones, say, or Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion. McEwan’s new novel, Solar, unlike any of his previous work, is avowedly comic. And much of it is extremely funny, most of the time on purpose, as it plots its antihero’s cynical and self-serving efforts to ...”

“... thinking, to deduce x: the identity of the murderer. Take, by way of concrete illustration, Michael Innes’s Death at the President’s Lodging (1936). The president in question is Dr Josiah Umpleby, head of St Anthony’s College, Oxbridge (not to be confused with St Antony’s, Oxford, which wasn’t founded till 1950; Innes’s setting is a ...”

“... of the desk-bound and lionised, and J.M. Coetzee too showed signs of becoming a chronic case. Now Michael Chabon has produced Moonglow, supposedly based on conversations from 1989 between a writer called Michael Chabon and his dying grandfather, an engineer for whom space travel in general and rockets in particular were an ...”

“... the Lord Weinstock, the Lord Aldington, the Lord Kearton, not to mention plain Mr Harvey-Jones of ICI – were deeply unhappy about some of the Government’s economic policies. Nonsense, replied Mr Lawson robustly: they may whinge in public, but in private all these industrialists will tell you that we’re really putting up a jolly good ...”

“... we concede that May, however ghastly, is a more attractive option than flesh-creeping figures like Michael Gove or Liam Fox. Rather, Ziblatt prompts consideration of more fundamental options. Having the whole appalling crew in power from time to time has been the necessary cost of avoiding a fragile and fearful democracy that never knows when the next military ...”

“... Award for Between the World and Me, his essay on race and violence. Coates’s close friend Prince Jones was killed in Virginia in 2000. ‘When Prince Jones died, there were no cameras. There was nobody looking. The officer that killed him was not prosecuted. He was not even disciplined by the police force.’ In the ...”

“... music was mostly written by the Black lyricist and composer Charlie Smalls, and produced by Quincy Jones. It tells a story of Black freedom and resistance through boogie-woogie, disco, funk and soul. The movie was an adaptation of a successful stage play, which swapped Kansas for Harlem, the Munchkins for graffiti artists and the Good Witch of the North for ...”

“... turn parody into new reality and the Gothic into his own version of the electrically banal. John Jones may be right to write off The Idiot in his study and leave it out of discussion. Even its humour is disproportionate, and it is peculiarly difficult to separate in it the essential from the inessential, the blind alley (Myshkin) from the continuing way. Yet ...”

“... on for advice, and when he arrived at the grotto he received a visitation from the Archangel Michael, who ordered him to consecrate a Christian altar on the site. It’s not known what happened to the man with the arrow in his forehead, but the result of his misadventure was the famous Santuario di San Michele. In 999 AD, the Holy Roman Emperor, Otto ...”

“... back an imaginary past, an epoch of freedom and justice. The phrase is not Hazlitt’s but Stanley Jones’s, and gives an idea of the crispness of Jones’s style, as the instance does of the erudition with which he has reached into every cranny of Hazlitt’s distracted polemical existence. His book is a monument of ...”

“... Because the man himself is so ungainly, it is easy to overlook Michael Moore’s voice. Where his body seems ungovernable and a source of embarrassment to him – he often can’t bear to watch himself on screen – his voice is confident, almost suave. There’s a moment in his least known movie, The Big One (1997), where he launches effortlessly into a gravelly imitation of Dylan singing ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ before reverting, with a chuckle, to his own spoken voice ...”

“... my friends, I mean my close friends. Then he made matters worse by saying he had had a talk with Michael (Heseltine). ‘He is formidable.’ ‘He’, pause, ‘is’, pause, ‘formidable’. I got him back to the station at four thirty, smelling powerfully of brandy. Seeing I was a bit dejected, Bruce said he would plug me with John Major and David ...”

“... endorse this: ‘The books here on my shelves have countless examples of similar behaviour.’When Michael Ryan murdered 14 people in Hungerford in 1987 (and then killed himself), the idea was put about that he’d been motivated by watching Rambo videos. That someone could, apparently without motive, massacre strangers on the streets of a Berkshire town was ...”

“... was the final episode of the fifth season of Dynasty, when Amanda Carrington’s wedding to Prince Michael of Moldavia is interrupted by a gang of Balkan rebels bursting into the royal chapel and shooting everyone down with machine-guns. The vaporous metaphorical role played by music in Bel Canto is taken in Patchett’s new novel, State of Wonder, by medical ...”

“... come to suppose that everything can be done by Notes. When I was a student I appeared in a play by Michael Codron, directed by his friend, Adrian Brown: just before we went on, Codron appeared to give us a Note. ‘Adrian is making this too heavy and Germanic,’ he said. ‘I want it to be light, French, a soufflé.’ This confused us performers and wrecked ...”