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“... I had spent profitable time in the library, and, on this occasion, I found myself sitting next to Richard Meier, the uncompromising Modernist architect. Meier, who had just won the commission to build the new complex on top of the Santa Monica mountains, was expanding on the content of his brief, and momentarily I must have forgotten whom I was talking ...”

“... they still represented 12 per cent of all American movies. But if the year that brought Richard Nixon’s triumphant re-election was the last in which the number of Western releases would reach double figures, the residual significance of the West as the bedrock of American identity was eloquently reiterated, just before the collapse of Soviet ...”

“... player. Here she meets the dweeby, good-hearted Walter Berglund and his charismatic best friend Richard Katz, lead singer and guitarist of art-punk band the Traumatics. Richard loves Walter because of his moral seriousness; Walter loves Richard because everyone does, including ...”

“... him on the forehead. When I arrived at Westminster, the headmaster was the Reverend Harold Costley-White. He was a large, extremely handsome man, silver-haired, highly mellifluous, somewhere between a bishop and a general risen from the cavalry, and altogether lacking in any sense of the absurd. He announced the death of King George V as ‘nothing short of a ...”

“... restlessness in After Hours with P.G. Wodehouse. Readers of this journal may recall a Diary by Richard Usborne (LRB, 4 October 1984) in which a determined investigation into the origins of Wodehouse’s use of ‘exquisite Tanagra figurine’ led to an evocation of the days when cut-price Boeotian coroplasts cluttered the shops of St Tropez. That Diary is ...”

“... they are of Osama bin Laden. I am exactly the sort of person Hitchens has in mind. Ever since the White House rammed the USA Patriot Act through Congress, I have spent more time worrying about what my government will do than about what the terrorists will do. Questions about the constitutionality of the powers now being claimed by the executive branch have ...”

“... The friend in the title of Edmund White’s new novel is a writer called Will Wright, a straight man with bad skin but a sterling pedigree. What little we learn about Will’s first novel – a metafictional romance about a man, the heiress he loves and an anthropomorphic cat – comes from Jack Holmes, a handsome, closeted editorial assistant who works with him at a literary quarterly in Manhattan ...”

“... to review An Accidental MP, Martin Bell’s account of how he ended up wearing nothing but white suits. And now they’ve got Honor Fraser, a supermodel, to write about Nicholas Blincoe’s latest novel, White Mice (Sceptre, £10.99), because it’s set in the world of fashion. The thinking behind the title is ...”

“... is tan, roughly triangular, sharp but kindly. His eyes are a fine light blue, his short hair pure white. With glasses, he looks like an upper-level, not absolutely top-grade French bureaucrat, an administrator in a colonial territory (such as the Algeria in which he spent his early life). Without glasses, he could pass for a French movie star, a mix of Jean ...”

“... certificates’ (Persilscheine) after the detergent that claimed to wash ‘whiter than white’. Volker Berghahn has gone to considerable lengths to hand out Persil certificates to Nazi journalists such as Zehrer and Sethe. His book is a whitewash, based on distortion, manipulation, speculation and suppression of the facts. Moreover, when we look ...”

“... are indeed many others, including a couple by those equivocal and highly talented authors, T.H. White and Richard Hughes, published before the war and now forgotten. White’s ‘The Troll’, which appeared in 1935 in a collection called Gone to Ground, concerns the narrator’s ...”

“... had assumed that his main problem would lie with the National Security Council Adviser, Richard Allen. Under Nixon, and again under Carter, rivalry between the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State had resulted in the departure of the latter. Haig was determined to block any repetition of the ruthless way he had seen Secretary Rogers ...”

“... of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of miles into central ...”

“... the most popular movie and, after the Bible, the best-selling book of all time, is a monument to white supremacy. The book and film offer different variations on the theme: the David O. Selznick production replaced Mitchell’s celebration of the Ku-Klux-Klan with a visually unforgettable paean to ‘the cavalier society’ of antebellum Atlanta, with its ...”

“... In Arthur Schlesinger’s court history, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, which might without unfairness be called the founding breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire ...”