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“... chucked at the officials who gave prizes to Gilbert and George and at the critics who acclaimed Julian Schnabel, begin to wonder whether we might be mistaken for part of the congregation – or is it a rally? – and find ourselves having to kneel, or sing the National Anthem. The subject of art schools is raised. Will Fuller have some ideas for reforming ...”

“... least innocent amusement.’ Shelley was aware of his reputation for high-minded solemnity – ‘Julian is rather serious,’ he said of his self-portrait in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, a poem of exquisitely high spirits that breathes his gratitude for Byron’s friendship and good humour. ‘Perhaps no one will believe in ...”

“... and stays fucked for the next five thousand years.’)His last novel, Purity (2015), featured a Julian Assange-ish anti-corruption activist, which allowed Franzen to go whole hog on the rottenness of techno-capitalism. When James Meek reviewed the novel for the LRB (24 September 2015), he argued that too much of it read like ‘extracts from workaday ...”

“... It is also a little odd of her to suppose that such businessmen as J.D. Allcroft, Sir Isaac Bell and Lord Armstrong (a newly created peer, and therefore quite properly middle-class according to Macleod’s definition) were slipping from the aristocratic embrace because they erected vast new country houses for themselves rather than buying old ones. On ...”

“... writer,’ he replies: ‘I write too.’ Then he asks her: ‘Tell me, do you enjoy the novels of ...”

“... ever in Chipping Camden.’ This is all we’re allowed to see. ‘Is this frustrating?’ Julian Barnes asked in his introduction to the 2013 edition. ‘Yes. Is it unfair? A little. Is it calculated? Exactly so.’Fitzgerald’s working papers, held at the Harry Ransom Center in Texas, reveal hints of the future she imagined for Chiara and ...”

“... tendency to argue both sides achieves poignancy in his famous, and well-deserved, attack on Julian Schnabel: ‘in Schnabel,’ he charges, ‘our time of insecure self-congratulation and bulimic vulgarity got the genius it deserved,’ only to write a little later, apropos of Thomas McEvilley’s remark that ‘somehow the age ...”

“... in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (its category speculative neurohistory, at a guess), Julian Jaynes proposes that, at the time Pizarro and his men reached them, the Inca didn’t have full mental autonomy but only ‘protosubjectivity’. They functioned largely by a sort of automatism, acting according to unchanging patterns and ritual ...”

“... Gothic enough to hang bells in’ was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a permanently startled expression, and curiously finished off with a high green silk headdress, concealing her hair, so that it is not known whether she has any ...”

“... principles, as Reith defined them in an apologetic letter to the Times after a talk by Julian Huxley had made a brief allusion to birth control. Scripts and songs were scanned for double entendres (notoriously, ‘winter draws on’) and newsreaders wore evening dress, though plus-fours were allowed in the office on Saturdays. Murphy, whose first ...”

“... as well as a dining-room, under a rambling thatched roof), and a little later the sound of the bells around the necks of the cows and oxen in the boma. But the cow bells were not heard again, and when at six o’clock the herd-boy went to let the animals out, there was a commotion. The ...”

“... Weaver translates tagliatelle as ‘noodles’, which would hardly be felt necessary today). Julian Barnes, in a tough and very thorough review of Lydia Davis’s translation of Flaubert, summed up the issue: ‘If you want the book in “English”,’ he asks, ‘what sort of English do you choose? Put simply, on the novel’s first page, do you want ...”

“... with the few resources at her disposal, and of her relationships with her animals: Lynx, the dog; Bella, a cow; the bullock that Bella gives birth to; and a cat and her various kittens. In Germany and Austria, The Wall is routinely compared to Robinson Crusoe, but it’s more like Walden in a parallel universe ...”

“... Keneally was also on the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help ...”

“... the tools used were Kaplan-Meier estimators, developed in 1958 after Edward Kaplan, working at Bell Labs on the problem of vacuum tube survival in transatlantic telephone cable repeaters, was put in touch with Paul Meier, who was working on cancer survival using a similar method.) The use of these techniques in medicine and in the world of cancer is ...”