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“... ruthlessness, sentimentality and greed. David Selznick came of age in that world. His father, Lewis Selznick, was an early, unsuccessful mogul. In a line not quoted here, he allegedly told his sons: ‘Live expensively! Throw it around! Give it away! Always remember to live beyond your means. It gives a man confidence.’ But if father was a joker, he was ...”

“... Smith told Campbell that he did (‘When I see one of those Free Church ministers on the street in Lewis I feel like walking across the road and hitting him in the face ... It’s power they want, that’s all it is’), or any injustice of the last century in England being as alive as the Highland clearances are. Our world has been flattened and evenedout by ...”

“... in their enthusiastic disgust over his bad taste. It is unusual, for instance, to find Wyndham Lewis (for whom Murry was merely a ‘crafty gushbag’) so overtaken in the matter of invective. Virginia Woolf, who saw in him a posturing little man with bad teeth and a profoundly perverted nature, wrote: ‘he has been rolling in dung, and smells ...”

“... for Scientology’s recruitment of Hollywood celebrities – Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Juliette Lewis, Kirstie Alley, Peaches Geldof – who serve as evidence that the religion makes the ‘able more able’. Even William Burroughs, during his brief stint in the church, was featured in Freedom bragging that he’d become a more imaginative writer and ...”

“... key debates can be carried on almost unseen in long afternotes. Even such an authoritative work as Philip Williams’s Gaitskell, with its unrivalled picture of postwar Labour politics, wholly omits Gaitskell’s colourful sex life. ‘I decided at the outset I wasn’t going into all that,’ he told me. American biography, as Robert Caro’s vast Life of LBJ ...”

“... into a paranoid ‘zeal for order’ of his own (I mean this as a compliment, according to the Philip K. Dick definition of the paranoiac as ‘the person with all the facts’ on whom the maintenance of meaning in the world seems to depend). At the same time his short history of outmoded techniques also points to a counter-argument to his vision of total ...”

“... chances are that it was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I cringed for my former self when I saw Philip Kaufman’s 1988 adaptation again. Everything about it was wrong, from the opening shots of crumbling plaster and dim lightbulbs in the stairwell of a Prague tenement (three of Kundera’s bugbears in The Art of the Novel are verisimilitude, realistic ...”

“... obstacle to the historical understanding of Burke has been the extraordinary detestation which Sir Lewis Namier conceived for him and all his works, and which was transmitted to Namier’s authoritatively placed disciples. He is right to combat this, because it took the form of persistent denigration of Burke’s character and motives; unfortunately, he has ...”

“... interconnected.The new direction taken by Welsh campaigners was signalled in 1962 when Saunders Lewis, a founding member of Plaid Cymru, made a speech arguing that defending the Welsh language and Welsh culture, rather than self-government, should be the primary goal of nationalists, and that direct action should be the strategy. Welsh was in real danger of ...”

“... a rule be made that no chief could have a white wife. The minister for Commonwealth relations, Philip Noel-Baker, was planning a period of direct administration, and Khama was not allowed to take up the chieftaincy. In July 1949, the government set up a judicial inquiry into the matter under Justice Sir Walter Harrigan. Harrigan found that allegations that ...”

“... Marché, named after Boucicaut’s Paris store although it was founded by a Londoner called David Lewis. Between 1920 and 1924 it was given an art deco makeover and was regarded as ‘one of the finest examples of modern architecture that Liverpool possesses’. There were also Owen Owen and Lewis’s, which catered for ...”

“... in the competition.) Entitled ‘The Hell It Can’t’, the story was intended to rebuke Sinclair Lewis’s Popular Front novel It Can’t Happen Here. I once went to the labour of digging up this un-anthologised tale, which describes an episode of vicious fascist violence, and could see in it, if I chose, premonitions of Bellow’s later impatient ...”

“... conversation) that he has never been introduced to Woolf’s work: ‘My book’s sub-plot is Philip K. Dick, sales-talk, Hollywood and schitzophrenia.’ So I’m forced to describe Woolf in terms of Dick’s excellent ‘straight’ novels of the sliding life in the Western States, In Milton Lumky Territory and Humpty Dumpty in Oakland. The keenest ...”

“... of oppressive respectability. Some instances of slumming can, of course, be furnished: C. Day Lewis was free to write detective fiction under the pseudonym of Nicholas Blake and so not soil the reputation of the serious poet. Pseudonymy is essentially a disguise, a device for throwing readers off the scent. For absolute security’s sake the choice of ...”

“... turned fast and reckless. ‘Go ahead is our maxim and our password,’ the New York politician Philip Hone wrote in 1837. ‘We go ahead with a vengeance, regardless of the consequences and indifferent about the value of human life.’ Most contemporaries were more exuberant about the American ‘passwords’: get ahead, go ahead, ascend, succeed and ...”