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“... fallen on drink and hard times. During the final week everything that could go wrong did, with the star stumbling through rehearsals in an alcoholic stupor and mumbling a summarised version of the dialogue which Williams was still rewriting. All seemed lost by the second matinee and the producers prepared a closing notice, but then came the news of two short ...”

“... see fittest to be written down. The Letter hangs there in the dark abysses of the Past: if like a star almost extinct, yet like a real star; fixed; about which there is no cavilling possible. That autograph Letter, it was once all luminous as a burning beacon, every word of it a live coal, in its time; it was once a piece ...”

“... to their positions when the war ended.In August 1947 there was a visit from the Hollywood star Vivian Blaine. Ross spent £1 2/- on streamers and £3 15/- on hiring a van and loud hailer for three days. Blaine sent advance notice that ‘no autographs will be given.’ The following year the Eldorado Ice Cream company wrote to say it had been forced ...”

“... name of morality.It would be a pity if this were attributed to a single ill-judged remark, which Christopher Hilliard describes in A Matter of Obscenity as ‘the most famous self-inflicted wound in English legal history’. There is plenty of competition for that distinction, starting with Oscar Wilde’s ‘Oh dear, no, he was a particularly plain ...”

“... sustained his rather dutiful-sounding devotion to his swami – in a shrewd preface to the diaries Christopher Hitchens speaks of Isherwood’s ‘amazing willingness to put up with the swami’ – which seems to have replicated something of his irritated devotion to his family, while the relationship with Bachardy became his true ‘means of ...”

“... it. A book appeared, with Edward’s conclusion. The rift was over. In 1986 we met in New York. Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, he and I had been brigaded to discuss agendas for radical history at the New School. In the overflowing auditorium, hanging on his words, he was die image of a romantic orator: his bursts of passionate speech punctuated by that ...”

“... Pursuit of the Millennium, Theodor Adorno (in particular his great and mordant Minima Moralia), Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences and recapitulations of various people who were swept up in the storms ...”

“... honorary Scriblerian; he was also later distantly linked with Bolingbroke, to whom he addressed star-struck letters as a foot-soldier in the ‘patriot’ opposition to Walpole. Hill’s connections provided Brewster with an alibi for her potentially ‘criminal’ interest in him; her book is built around two long chapters on his dealings with Pope and ...”

“... Laying on of Hands’ opens in a High Anglican church, St Andrew Upchance near Shoreditch, for the star-studded funeral of Clive Dunlop, ‘quite young – 34 according to the dates given on the front of the Order of Service’, but ‘these days there was not much mystery about that.’ When I returned the folder Catherine was feeling unwell. On the ...”

“... anti-statist groups, the Joint International Committee of the Movements for European Unity. Its star was Winston Churchill, out of office but by no means out of ideas or charisma, and now renewing his old attachment to the idea of a federal Europe. In particular Duranti credits Churchill with having ‘removed the tarnish of Axis propaganda from European ...”

“... and These Times (2020). For the record, here are some of Carmen Callil’s causes: 1950s. At the Star of the Sea convent in Melbourne, Carmen acquired a lifelong revulsion for the Catholic Church. All through lockdown, Carmen, Helen Simpson, Graeme Segal and I met monthly online for our tiny book club. One of the books Carmen praised wholeheartedly was Small ...”

“... in 1961 and who told the press she would ‘spend, spend, spend’ (she later served as the cover star of the Smiths’ single ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’), is the presiding spirit. Viv struggled, but the idea that an ordinary person can be elevated by riches, transformed by holidays and furs, is more plausible to many than transformation through ...”

“... said De Loach had told him that he was up to date on the thing because he had a call from Texas. A Star reporter was making an inquiry in the last week or so, and LBJ got very hot and called Deke [De Loach] and said to him that if the Nixon people are going to play with this, that he would release (deleted material – national Security) saying that our side ...”

“... Later on in the decade he did some stalking of actresses; Geraldine Fitzgerald, a future Hollywood star whom he met at a showbiz party, moved out of her flat in response to his attentions. Then, in 1948, drunk and embittered after attending a screening of the miscast Hitchcock version of Rope, he reactivated a shadowy earlier affair with Lady Ursula ...”

“... having Tartar and Cossack blood, and of being an illegitimate son of Ivan Mosjoukine, an interwar star of Russian and French silent films. Being a Lithuanian Jew was a more complicated matter. Gary’s most forceful assertion of Jewishness came in The Dance of Genghis Cohn (1967), in which the ghost of a Yiddish-speaking nightclub comedian possesses his Nazi ...”