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“... plain to downright ugly, if you don’t count Glen Ford or Dana Andrews (who weren’t exactly Paul Newman or Montgomery Clift themselves). My generation have Cahiers du cinéma, Godard and Truffaut to thank for the earlier generation of movie stars we might have overlooked. More fundamentally, we have to thank Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who ...”

“... it gives me the fidgets.’ But his intellectual curiosity was nothing like as studied as that of Paul Nash, a somewhat patronising friend, who construed metaphysicality if not surreality wherever he chanced to look. Nash came to live near Rye in 1925 and, Burra gleefully reported, was subjected by his wife to the local music scene: ‘He said my dear must ...”

“... sounds,’ she once said, ‘like I’m starring at the Gaiety Theater.’ Her brother, Paul, called her Doke. Childhood friends called her Dodo or Didi or Priscilla Preoccupied. Michael Curtiz called her Miss Lachrymose (she could weep on cue). Jack Carson called her Zelda. Fans called her Miss Huckleberry Finn. Film crews called her Nora Neat and ...”

“... at the moment he became a monument: there are those he counted as friends (Gertrude Stein, Jean-Paul Sartre) and those he had little time for (André Gide, Jean Cocteau); there’s his wrangling with dealers and gallerists; there’s his involvement with the Communist Party, which he joined in 1944, because one ‘goes to the fountain’; there’s his wit ...”

“... in safety net’ or ‘too poor to survive catastrophic illness’. The people I lived with in the hills of central Haiti had a concise way of putting it: these were ‘stupid deaths’. It was to prevent such deaths that Partners In Health was founded in the mid-1980s, with the aim of providing care for the ailments, trivial or catastrophic, that afflicted ...”

“... by Minister Farakhan. Some campuses, like Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, and Macalester, in St Paul, Minnesota, are served by bookstore-cafés, which double as literary salons; others inhabit a wasteland of thrift shops and greasy spoons. Faculty lifestyles and manners vary widely as well. At Queens College, in a polyglot borough of New York, we dined at a ...”

“... stately and beautiful wife of the camp commandant. He, the commandant, ‘the Old Boozer’ Major Paul Doll is the second narrator-character, and really the only reason for reading the book: an almost excessively interestingly put-together figure, full of stylistic tics, who blends English and German, business-speak and deadpan, vanity and piffle. Like an ...”

“... rough stone and burgeoning foliage. The series of photos of Maar’s friend, Nusch Eluard, wife of Paul Eluard, the poet and friend of Picasso, is brilliant, if more premeditated. In one shot, entitled The Years Lie in Wait for You (c.1932-34), the fragile beauty of Nusch’s head is veiled by a spider’s web. Maar’s portraits of the male Surrealists ...”

“... two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American ...”

“... and it is the latter category which dominates A Word from the Loki. In poems such as Paul Muldoon’s ‘Immram’, Blake Morrison’s ‘Dark Glasses’ and Armitage’s ‘About His Person’, reconstruction allows the reader to feel that he is playing detective. It is one of the dominant models for the contemporary poem – less a set of ...”

“... in Augustus. The hero has a slave, called Septimus, a bonnie laddie from the Sabine Hills, ‘with ungrammatical Latin and long vowel sounds’, who recalls the despondent Augustus to his duty by shouting: ‘Be a man, General! You say you’re sent to save Rome, and I believe you, even if you’re greeting like a bairn now.’ Virgil, I ...”

“... discussion include Michael Bracewell, Dick Hebdige, Lynne Tillman, Kathy Acker, Jean Baudrillard, Paul Johnson, W.G. Sebald. The eateries and supermarkets of Aberdeen are visited, and rendered, as far as I can see, entirely accurately. (I come from Aberdeen, which is how I’d know.) Ditto the hills walked and the stone ...”

“... my third-floor balcony a swimming-pool posed for a David Hockney painting, the water the colour of Paul Newman’s eyes, though it was deemed too cold to be usable in ‘winter’. (Appropriately enough, I had met Hockney during my previous visit to LA, through my artist brother. His brother was there too, giving, I think, financial advice to the ...”

“... I often talked about the MacDonalds of Achbuie, Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians who inhabited the hills between Glen Urquhart and Beauly. ‘It was a sad day we left the croft,’ he said (I didn’t tell him that Sad Day We Left the Croft was the title of a Scottish punk compilation from 1981). He could be heavy-hearted when he recalled his father turning ...”

“... a washbasin, an earthenware jug, some tin mugs. The four Dutchmen, Thomas, Johan, Wim and Paul, drank a strange, sluggish beer . . . For a modest fee she would grant them ‘grace and favour’ in her room. One at a time, twenty minutes each. Or else all five of them at once, at a discount. She is, of course, rather more than just a whore. She loves ...”