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“... underside to their natures. Perelman, who lived entirely off his wit, as scriptwriter, play-wright feuilletoniste, as he liked it to be called (‘a writer of little leaves’), normally appears in his own work as a wide-eyed naive, the easiest of marks to a swarm of fraudulent predators: so it is no surprise to be told in this first biography that he ...”

“... Ian Hamilton came to biography late and triumphantly with his life of the dead but still warm Robert Lowell. Riding high, he went on to attempt an unauthorised life of the aged but very much alive J.D. Salinger and was comprehensively outfoxed by the second most reclusive man in American letters. Hamilton wrote up his experience as a rueful memoir, In ...”

“... firm and doubts, expressed by my mother, about comrades in the UK (‘I wish they were more like Robert Kee’), and scepticism about developments in Eastern Europe and North Korea. The watchers were good at their job, accurately picking up conversations in pubs, railway stations and elsewhere (‘MacGibbon arrived at Liverpool Street with boy and ...”

“... but the family lived in a modernist house designed by an uncle who had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright. Russell was named for his father, with whom he seems to have had a fractious but intensely close relationship; an ex-girlfriend remembers being surprised that even in his early twenties Russell still routinely referred to Charles Sr as ...”

“... Harry in Afghanistan in 2007 and 2008. He had several contacts at Broadmoor, including an orderly, Robert Neave (‘Tipster Bob’), whom he paid £9000 to supply him with news about the Yorkshire Ripper and other killers. The investigation had found an email suggesting that Pyatt paid a Thames Valley police officer – never traced – £1500 for a tale about ...”

“... Trimble went to Drumcree and clambered onto it. There the notorious Loyalist terrorist Billy Wright sat in a deckchair sunning himself. ‘What on earth do you think you are doing?’ Trimble asked the Loyalists in boiler suits manning the digger. They responded angrily, and one denounced him as an MI5 agent. He was rescued by some Orangemen, and was ...”

“... experiment (Mary Butts, Djuna Barnes, John Rodker) was discounted, along with the social realists (Robert Westerby, James Curtis, Alexander Baron), who remain trapped in a ghetto of unfashionable leftist politics and unfashionable locations. The locations – Whitechapel, Notting Hill – have recovered, but the politics have evaporated like a puddle on hot ...”

“... made the younger generation of Iraqis more narrow-minded politically; his successor. Sir Martin Wright, that most proconsular of post-war British diplomats, known to his wife as ‘His Excellency’ or, in rare moments of informality, as ‘H.E.’, was much more complacent. That he had enough evidence to the contrary is shown by Louis’s telling ...”

“... Philip Wills was our bard. That remarkable man had started gliding in 1933 (how close to the Wright brothers that is beginning to seem!), and by 1939 had not only established himself as the leading British pilot, but had shown in those few years that it was possible to fly the length and breadth of England without an engine: on 30 April 1938, he had ...”

“... but they are no less tendentious. Several attack or parody the novelist Richard Wright, whom Micheaux evidently regarded as a rival, and warn against Communist-inspired ‘race-mixing’. A striking element of Micheaux’s work is the harshness of his judgments of the Negro masses who, he maintains, lack initiative, ‘that great and mighty ...”

“... in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago. (One of his cleverest poems, ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’, is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world’s heavyweights.) At school, works by Australian writers disappeared from the curriculum once senior classes were reached and the study became ...”

“... State. ‘When Democracy builds’ was the title of an ardent and prophetic lecture by Frank Lloyd Wright, Ned’s near-contemporary. But, for Lutyens, democratic government could ‘only work through compromise, leaving its conscience in the hands of accountants’. Hospitals, schools, factories, cinemas and underground railway stations had no place in his ...”

“... influenza. If he struck many of those who met him, from Alfred Jarry to Max Jacob to Picasso to Robert Delaunay, as larger than life, as the avant-garde spirit incarnate, and if his long poems, like those of Whitman and O’Hara, seem to expand and prolong themselves as effortlessly as amoebas in a petri dish, then beneath the shifting decors and personae a ...”

“... density more or less lightly. It favours stories about gangland hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap star in her ...”

“... the 20th century. Both fled their home cities as children to escape racial violence: Gordon, the Robert Charles riots of 1900, in which a mob of white Southerners murdered dozens after an African American man shot a police officer who had asked what he was doing in a mainly white neighbourhood; Croll, the Odessa pogrom of 1905, in which more than four ...”