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“... unlike now: Have a good butcher’s at these – there we for ever are in glamorous black-and- white, assertively staring out next to Germaine, Bardot, Twiggy and Lulu, Dusty and Yoko, Bassey, Babs, Sandy, Diana Dors. And London was safer then on account of us. Look at the letters we get – Dear Twins, them were the Good Old Days Duffy has always been ...”

“... in 2013? With Welsh being the best-known chronicler of underclass addiction, and St Aubyn in his Patrick Melrose books documenting the ravages of the same habits in a more privileged milieu, there’s a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last ...”

“... fourth position, but more naturally placed. She wears a loose gown draped crosswise with a white veil, a floating X over her heart. Coming out of the turn and moving in the direction of the camera, her arms melt open as her head falls back. The white column of her neck, the spade-like underside of her jaw, the lifted ...”

“... Blakelock. Moonlight portrays ‘an American idyll, the world the Indians had inhabited before the white man came to destroy it’. Barber’s desert paintings, if his story is true, must be even closer to the pristine idyll than Blakelock had come. When, in the novel’s final pages, Marco at last sets out on his westward journey there is no doubt what he is ...”

“... past. For the first time in more than a year there was no danger of suicide car bombs. A blue and white police vehicle hooted at a small child kicking a ball. Children often play in the alleyway behind the hotel – their favourite game, played with plastic Kalashnikovs, is Americans v. the resistance – but it had been a long time since I had seen any of ...”

“... as a form of philosophical discourse but from the idea (best exemplified in the work of Hayden White) that as a story, or something contrived, history is not all that different from stories which make no claim to ‘truth’. ‘Dear reader,’ he wrote in a typically self-conscious style (and here I paraphrase), the story I am about to tell differs from ...”

“... me: Still, I’d say $500 wouldn’t be too bad, wouldn’t you? This is a typical anecdote about Patrick Kavanagh, touching as it does on his unproductiveness (‘the ex-poet’), his peculiar connection to Yeats, his prickliness. Kavanagh was born in 1904 in the townland of Mucker in the parish of Inniskeen, County Monaghan. At 13 he left school to work for ...”

“... page of some British newspapers. But the case was soon forgotten, unlike the more lurid pieces of white mischief which went on in the so-called Happy Valley. Yet the Selwyn affair mattered more, and like George Orwell’s Burmese Days (published in the same year), it encapsulated almost all the stresses of British colonialism.In 1934, aged four, Liz ...”

“... Several pages seemed to have been mauled by cats, as I later found to have been the case. Patrick Thursfield was instantly ‘caught up by the sweep of the story’, and this English edition is the result. The first book, especially, reads like a discovery in the attic, with the strangeness natural to translation, and the careless misprints of a hasty ...”

“... particularly easy in the US in the hysterical atmosphere after 9/11 – as a black and white struggle between good and evil. The crippling inadequacies of the opposition were ignored. By 2011 the complexity of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was evident to journalists in Baghdad and Kabul if not necessarily to editors in London and New ...”

“... as any of its predecessors, yet – except for Uncle Perry Hazard’s conjuring routines, white doves produced from handkerchiefs, ladies sawn in half, and the like – it eschews magic tricks. The word Wonderland is used here as a simile for Hollywood. In this, her first novel for seven years, Carter has put away her fantastic toys, with the crucial ...”

“... a hideaway with its kitchen facilities and trap-door onto the roof is plausible in the ‘great white hall of bumbledom’, it could certainly be found at the top of many an Oxbridge staircase. Finally, when their idyll is rumbled by his superior, Summerchild embarks on a suicidal midnight odyssey across the roofs of the neighbouring ministries, in ...”

“... But he didn’t act in earnest until an American adviser to Japanese authorities in Korea, Durham White Stevens, was shot dead in San Francisco in March 1908 by a Korean nationalist. Bethell published exultant reports of the assassination, his Korean paper carrying the story under the headline ‘Particulars of the attack upon the scoundrel Stevens’. This ...”

“... of Obama and his visit. They were only too happy to tell him. ‘Why does it matter to us if a white man or a black man wins the election?’ one irate driver asked. ‘Obama and Bush are two faces on the same currency, an American currency.’ Another asked: ‘Why does he come here? What will he do for us? Will he fix the electricity? He is just coming ...”

“... when a real turning point is reached people are naturally sceptical about its significance. The White House is anyway so keen to keep quiet about what it has agreed in Iraq that it hasn’t even published a copy of the SOFA in English. Some senior officials in the Pentagon privately criticise Bush for conceding so much, but the American media are fixated on ...”