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“... for hours to the house where a friend is staying by following instructions in code (‘it was not wise to name it in a letter which they might read’). The moment of arrival is a triumph. The regime has been temporarily outwitted; its surveillance isn’t as highly developed as the surveillance in Nineteen Eighty-Four or Zamyatin’s We. Love survives and ...”

“... In the Woody Allen movie Hannah and Her Sisters Eliot (Michael Caine) contrives to cross paths on a Manhattan street with his sister-in-law. Lee (Barbara Hershey), with whom he has fallen in love. He pretends to be hunting for a bookshop: she shows him the way to it and there he finds, as if by chance, E.E. Cummings’s Collected Poems, which he insists on buying for her ...”

“... men in judgment? Have not almost all lawless errors crept into the world through the means of wise men (so-called)? The egalitarianism of Leland and other popular preachers may have been painful to the privileged, but it gave relief to ordinary people who could not reconcile themselves to what they were taught to believe – men like Samuel Crane ...”

“... not to be confused with a novel of the same title by Anita Brookner). In the earlier book Michael Cullen left working-class Nottingham for the metropolis, fell into the proverbial bad company, and ended up as a convicted gold-smuggler. Now, having been abandoned by his wife after ten years of idleness in the Cambridgeshire village of Upper Mayhem, he ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... Dalziel and Sergeant Peter Pascoe would develop as they have, except Reginald Hill’s unusual and wise decision never to write consecutive novels about them.* Their debut in A Clubbable Woman (1970) came eight years after Julian Symons had first pronounced the ‘detective story’ dead; as late as 1989 T.J. Binyon, in Murder Will Out, though finding them ...”

“... he drifts into their ways of thinking, caught by the spell: he has great respect for an old wise-woman, Mother Gisson, who represents good magic (he seems to think) against Ratti’s bad magic. He is strongly affected by the mountain landscape and atmosphere, which he beautifully describes. There is one enormous sentence (a page long, but ...”

“... In a gloss on the snot riddle in his book Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value, Michael Thompson explains that the riddle succeeds by playing upon that which is residual to our system of cultural categories. When, in the context of wealth and poverty, we talk of possessable objects we unquestioningly assume that we are talking about ...”

“... This​  is a fabulous book, beautiful, generous, sombre and wise, a wistful romance about a man writing a book like Always Crashing in the Same Car. Don’t fall for that subtitle – a mere concession to academic access and what used to be called the zeitgeist. As if a book as good as this can really be expected to flourish ...”

“... of personal history and the pretty stuff on the public record. Let’s take the spirit of J. Michael Lennon’s ‘double life’ of Norman Mailer and offer that doubleness back as subjective criticism. Mailer, after all, gave us the non-fiction novel, Lennon gives us the pseudo-objective biography, so why can’t I offer the confessional review? On the ...”

“... tanks didn’t counsel prudence. In the run-up to the war, RUSI’s director of military science, Michael Codner (King’s via the US Naval War College in Rhode Island), described it as ‘an intervention of choice designed to make the world on balance a safer and better place’. Britain was involved, Codner wrote, because ‘one of successive British ...”

“... two sides  of a DJ’s vinyl, something to be sampled, cut,  and sold like substances I’m not wise to yet.Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley don’t make the same kind of music: their meeting is a sign of Afro-diasporic unity, the kind Charleston would come to miss in a town where he ‘finds himself having to kiss up/because he is too sun-kissed to be ...”

“... no separatist, however, and acknowledged how much she owed to the men who helped her: Paul Hamlyn, Michael Holroyd, Sonny Mehta, Christopher MacLehose, Bob Gavron. 1980s-90s. When Carmen moved to Chatto as their managing director in 1982 she lavished care on her authors: Iris Murdoch, Hilary Mantel, Hermione Lee and other Bloomsbury biographers and ...”

“... not have to be a corpse (‘I’m asleep, you say, possibly dead’) and also indicates a debt to Michael Longley, who wrote a similar poem about Lowry’s painting. Whereas the vertical man was supposed to carry out dynamic acts of construction, the horizontal man is open to sober acts of reconstruction and it is the latter category which dominates A Word ...”

“... to the UN and said, evidently referring to the Irish Army: ‘We will not stand by.’ The wise knew what Lynch meant: we will huff and puff and do nothing. Fools thought he meant – and Unionists in the North pretended to think he meant – that he would send the Army across the Border to protect Catholics from the Protestant mobs. In August and ...”