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“... distinguished’, ‘critically and psychologically knowing’, having a ‘heart of gold’ and ‘humane’ – but Carrington’s unsensational presentation of the Southsea years carries more conviction than Seymour-Smith’s sandcastle of conjecture. Carrington’s view is that Kipling’s version of events is ‘true’ to the feelings of ...”

“... Selected Writings, Flann O’Brien’s The Poor Mouth. Next year’s list will have Good as Gold by Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut’s Jail-bird, Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, Michael Korda’s Charmed Lives, Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers, Bernard Malamud’s New Life, Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in ...”

“... honours were flowing in: a knighthood, a new professorship of poetry, which involved bestowing a gold medal on Thomas Hardy in partnership with W.B. Yeats, a supremely embarrassing occasion – all the honours which a literary man with the right attitudes (Edmund Gosse was such another) might expect to receive in those days. Newbolt’s private life remained ...”

“... cartoons, he published (or rather, mostly republished) work by John Steinbeck, Norman Mailer, Arthur Conan Doyle, Margaret Atwood, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Saul Bellow, P.G. Wodehouse, Anne Sexton and John Updike. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was first serialised in the magazine. ‘I only read it for the articles,’ joked subscribers, of which ...”

“... it might have been because he began by showing no interest in her; he had gone to interview Arthur Miller just before filming started on The Misfits, which would be Monroe’s last finished film. ‘I’ve seen you talk,’ he reports her saying, ‘to everyone but me.’ In fact he couldn’t forgive her for having turned Miller into Mr Monroe. ‘Not ...”

“... tabloid-style use of detail or intensives to taint, magnify or belittle, as in ‘300 tons of pure gold a year’ (my italic); and also the tabloid-style reverse, the undifferentiated, intellectually aimless but rallying rehearsal of certain ‘facts’: ‘31 and enormously wealthy’, ‘increasingly wealthy’, ‘now wealthy and with real estate values ...”

“... did – not only Bruccoli and Le Vot, but the earlier Fitzgerald biographers, Andrew Turnbull and Arthur Mizener, Zelda’s biographer Nancy Milford, and Sara Mayfield, author of Exiles from Paradise. Mellow relies so heavily upon his predecessors, in fact, that Fitzgerald fans who have only recently read the Le Vot book may find passages in Invented Lives ...”

“... colour reproduction of a 14th-century Persian miniature, ‘Humay on the Day After His Wedding Has Gold Coins Poured Over Him as He Leaves Humayun’s Room’, has been reproduced back to front, so that the Persian calligraphy in the painting has to be read with the aid of a mirror. This was doubtless the publisher’s error, rather than the authors’, but ...”

“... abortion rate suggests that ‘dating’ in this period implied more than a walk in the park. In Arthur Schnitzler’s Liebelei (sometimes translated as Flirtation), such relationships have little consequence for the prosperous Fritz and his friend Theodor in fin-de-siècle Vienna (so long as the woman isn’t married – Fritz’s downfall comes during a ...”

“... Stein speaks to the butlers and the chauffeurs, the studio wives, the bit-part players, to the Arthur Miller, Dennis Hopper and Gore Vidal part of the universe, and none of them lets her down, or lets her off. It is a wild compendium of stories about what it is to be a child in a world of childish adults, and her book feels political, a meditation on the ...”

“... sunshine and bohemia and ‘probably an unconscious desire to get away from Chicago’.Her father, Arthur Cohen, a political activist and labour organiser, died when she was thirteen. He casts a long shadow over her work and is given the last word in The Flowering, the latest addition to her autobiography. She describes the ‘near constant political ...”

“... on Saffron Walden. Saffron was used medicinally and as a flavouring but also for dyeing lace gold, which was much in vogue in the court of James I. Among the figures tramping the roads were the ‘simplers’, sellers of herbs for cooking and strewing. Mary Leech and Judith Vardey, mentioned in the records of the Fleet Market in the 1730s, sold ...”

“... When he was 23, A.S.J. Tessimond (Arthur Seymour John, Jack to his family, but known as John in later life) wrote to Ezra Pound, who had recently settled in Rapallo, enclosing some poems and an article on George Bernard Shaw. Tessimond’s letter does not survive, but Pound’s reply does. ‘Dear Sir,’ he wrote, If you were in the least familiar with my work you wd ...”

“... adventures that originally belonged to a separate branch of chivalric literature, the tales of Arthur and his Round Table. In the late 15th century this familiar material was handled with sophisticated wit by Luigi Pulci in Medici Florence and Matteo Maria Boiardo in Este Ferrara. Boiardo left his poem Orlando Innamorato unfinished at his death in ...”

“... of rank and race is more ambiguous than he wants to admit. He quotes the wife (unnamed) of Arthur Hamilton Gordon, installed as Governor of Fiji in 1874, who found the manners of the high-ranking Fijians ‘so perfectly easy and well bred. Nurse can’t understand it at all, she looks down on them as an inferior race. I don’t like to tell her that ...”