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“... I too​ was ‘a single man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I too was heartbroken (whereas George has just lost a long-term but considerably younger lover in a car accident, I’d lost my only somewhat younger lover in a break-up ...”

“... early 1960s.The subcultural change that led to the demise of this aesthetic was, according to George Melly, signalled by a ‘secret society’ that congregated at the party for the V&A’s Aubrey Beardsley exhibition in the summer of 1966. The next future would be looking backwards. Archigram’s architectural collages had always included ‘dolly ...”

“... The gallery is packed with work, the most exciting of it raw, rude and abrasive. The sculptor George Segal made a career out of positioning life-size white plaster figures in furnished tableaux, so it’s a jolt to encounter one of his early works here, Reclining Woman Bas Relief: Nude (1958), a drippy hank of white plaster flung on a wooden plank ...”

“... cites the Stirling building in the University of Cambridge, which houses the faculty ‘of which George Macaulay Trevelyan was once the titular head and principal ornament’: ‘Part bunker, part factory, part greenhouse, all folly, it embodies and projects an idea of history wholly unlike that in which Trevelyan ...”

“... with which it engages, to become an active component in much modern critical thinking. From George Saintsbury through I.A. Richards to Kenneth Burke, it has exercised the active stimulus, not of a privileged book, but of one which in each generation earns afresh its own authority. For all its oddities – and certainly it is the oddest volume ever ...”

“... night, snorted coke with Mick, Marianne and Brian Jones, made frocks for Faye Dunaway, Elizabeth Taylor, Sharon Tate, Brigitte Bardot and Liza Minnelli, slept with Celia Birtwell, David Hockney, Patrick Prockter, Wayne Sleep and assorted tall, thin models: was he the one who had a life? But the later fallen, paranoid speed-freak Ossie, who fished in the ...”

“... the nape of the neck. The cerebellum, he explained, was the seat of Amativeness, or sexual love. George Combe, natural philosopher and Edinburgh sage, was Scotland’s – possibly Britain’s – leading phrenologist. Men, he noted, had larger cerebella than women, ‘discernible in their thicker necks, just as highly sexed animals such as rams, bulls and ...”

“... stuffy and comatose instead of collapsing beautifully like France.’ Connolly’s fellow Etonian, George Orwell, in a sense plumps for England. Mr Fussell, by assembling in two long columns 56 disobliging adjectives applied by Orwell to aspects of British life from 1919 to 1939, seems to me to oversimplify a complex phenomenon: the love/hate relationship ...”

“... idealist. Under Haley’s enlightened rule, the triumvirate of Etienne Amyot, Leslie Stokes and George Barnes built an inspirational Third Programme that had initially to withstand a number of technical troubles – among them, the appropriation by Soviet Latvia of the waveband originally assigned to it – before it became the ‘envy of the ...”

“... is Morgan himself. He has written a long list of books about Wales, the Labour Party, Lloyd George, Wales, Jim Callaghan, Wales, the Labour Party, and just occasionally, to spice things up, about the Labour Party and Wales. He is not just fascinated by this little world but sentimental about it. Take Michael Foot’s marriage to Jill Craigie. Although ...”

“... what more could you wish for? ‘It was gold,’ as Joan Didion would say. The historian Taylor Branch visited Bill Clinton secretly at the White House once a month in the 1990s. On his first visit, in the spring of 1993, maxims and epigrams were flying about the place. Bill was quoting Suetonius, Hillary quoted Oscar Wilde, or so she ...”

“... Summer 1978) or to other worthwhile writing by political scientists such as Layton-Henry or Taylor, and although he has added references to events in 1979 and even 1980, he has not really brought his story up to date or accepted the implications of the result of the last General Election. He writes clearly and often perceptively about people and ...”

“... along with the Epsom bone-setter Sally Mapp, in The Company of Undertakers. But he put back George II’s dislocated thumb when the licensed physicians were all telling the King he had gout and was just going to have to put up with it. The third of Hogarth’s ‘undertakers’, John ‘Chevalier’ ...”

“... of public sorrow is to be applauded, along with the brilliance of her writing,’ Catherine Taylor wrote in the Telegraph. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the novel’s ‘extraordinary emotional ballast’, and Claire Messud added that it was ‘a necessary and valuable gift’. But a sentence like ‘Southern California was the white ...”

“... so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in Bournemouth; he was 84 that year. He had an eye for talent, and had once been friends with Wordsworth and Coleridge – he described them, rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating ...”