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“... by his friend, Pavel Tchelitchew, who had introduced him to Gorer. Before his passage to Africa, young Gorer had already published The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis de Sade and his mood was still dandy-left, rive-gauche, smoothly dissident and shocking. Africa Dances is now reissued as a paperback, in regrettably abbreviated form, with no pictures. We ...”

“... the protagonist of This Is the Life (1991), once served as a pupil barrister to celebrity QC Michael Donovan. He had thought he was in line for a position at the chambers, but was overlooked at the end of the pupillage. Donovan didn’t put his name forward and years later fails even to recognise him at a cocktail party. The opening page of The Breezes ...”

“... explicating Neo-Impressionism when it emerged in 1886 (he coined the term); and after Seurat died young in 1891, Fénéon surveyed his studio assiduously, preparing his posthumous reputation. Fénéon cut a dashing figure on the literary scene too, animating several journals, attending Mallarmé’s Symbolist salon and editing Rimbaud’s Illuminations. Amid ...”

“... was when we talked about the fact that I still played and he didn’t (‘Of course, you’re young … ’; 90 could say that to 62). We talked a bit about cricket when I would go round in the evenings (‘Yes, come round: I can still drink’), but mostly we talked about literature, which is to say mostly I tried to get him to talk. I was, am, too ...”

“... the economy bags.’‘Someone came in on Christmas Eve and asked for banana leaves,’ the keen young product manager over in fruit and vegetables told me, ‘and you know something? We had them.’You would have to say that Sainsbury’s is amazing. It has everything – 50 kinds of tea, 400 kinds of bread, kosher chicken schnitzels, Cornish pilchards ...”

“... architectural band of six men – Peter Cook, Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene – whose day jobs were with big commercial practices and local authorities. They formed in the early 1960s and over the next decade or so produced thousands of designs for ‘cities of the future’ that were highly ...”

“... Beirut, escaping the sun to browse the books on politics in the Virgin Megastore. A stack of Michael Moore’s Dude, Where’s My Country is in front of me. Across the street is the tent city that protesters against the Syrian presence in Lebanon pitched soon after the Valentine’s Day assassination of Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister. A few ...”

“... In​ 1977, Abba were waiting at Arlanda Airport in Stockholm when they noticed a dishevelled young man charging towards them. Their security guards spotted him too, along with the spatter of dried vomit on his leather jacket. ‘You’re my favourite band! I love you!’ a 20-year-old Sid Vicious slurred, as his idols were hurried to safety ...”

“... III. Imagine my surprise when, in the tube from Heathrow, there came in and sat down opposite me a young and rather austere woman who was reading, with the appropriate detached bespectacled air, the latest of the Ricardian Society’s Bulletins. And she wore, like some pop-star badge, an enamel medallion exhibiting a boar – the emblem of her favourite ...”

“... Nationalists assassinated Franco’s political heir, Carrero-Blanco. How could a collection of young Spaniards, on their own, be so efficient? This contempt for the organisational skills of individual revolutionary groups has inspired a number of writers in the past few years. Since, left to themselves, the argument runs, these woolly-minded and dangerous ...”

“... figure who doesn’t appear in the story in person. Goebbels is only glimpsed driving past with a young actress. Heydrich has succeeded Himmler as head of the SS. Berlin is a cosmopolitan city with many tourists. English domestic servants are prized by the haute-bourgeoisie, and the young people listen to rock ...”

“... seemed to be no gap between what he saw and what he said – though he refused to admit it. As a young man, he had made his living as a graphic designer, picture editor and photographer. And made a life fired up by ‘heavyweight leftist politics – and art’. He said he had wanted to create ‘a visual style for the left’ and he developed one when ...”

“... a heavily made-up woman baring her breasts, while The Policeman’s Daughter, Hampstead shows a young woman sitting naked in an upright wooden chair, half turned towards us. A bright light illuminates her body, throwing dark shadows across the floor, and making her appear strangely monumental against the bare backdrop of the bedroom in which she ...”

“... is called Kolob. Smith ‘translated’ the work from Egyptian papyri bought in 1835 from one Michael Chandler, in Kirtland, Ohio. The papyri were long thought to have been lost in the Chicago fire of 1871. In 1967, however, they resurfaced at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The museum returned them to the Church, and they were translated by ...”