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“... to be let alone.Two instances illustrate this to perfection, and both involve his friend and ally Lewis Namier. In the Salmagundi interview, Berlin said of the problem of assimilation:Sir Lewis Namier explained this extremely clearly. He said that Eastern European Judaism was a frozen mass until the rays of the Western ...”

“... aired and some understanding achieved. Contrast this with Question Time on BBC 1 last night with Norman Tebbit, Shirley Williams and some unidentified industrialist. Tebbit played his usual role of a sneer on legs, snarling and heaping contempt on any vaguely liberal view and the discussion, which was no discussion at all, was rancorous and rowdy and left ...”

“... peers of both Modernists and Georgians; and no reader could then have been blamed for thinking Day-Lewis, say, as important as Auden and the same kind of poet. If in 1820 there had been an anthology of the Cockney school, the poetic romances of Keats in it would not have seemed so different from those of Leigh Hunt. Already the pages of Alvarez’s The New ...”

“... The projectionist told me personally.’ Boys’ Town was a 1938 Hollywood movie, directed by Norman Taurog and admired for Spencer Tracy’s performance as a priest who rehabilitates juvenile delinquents in a kind of camp, through what we might call ‘tough love’, but not a film that would normally be considered a masterpiece. I imagine it must have ...”

“... of American Bases. Before I agreed (and in an effort to get out of going, I suspect) I consulted Norman Dombey who (as readers of the LRB know) is well versed in nuclear politics. Not that Menwith Hill – RAF Menwith Hill, as it is euphemistically called, though it’s almost wholly American – is (yet) a nuclear base, only a satellite warning and ...”

“... title for a play: ‘The Fun to be Had with Models of Dubious Sensibility’.30 July. Jessye Norman has been appearing at the Barbican. She is touchy about her size, and having difficulty getting into a small aeroplane, is supposed to have been told by air hostess to try getting in sideways. ‘Lady,’ she is said to have remarked, ‘I ain’t got no ...”

“... in Wabansia Avenue was, she explained in Force of Circumstance, ‘very much like the one Anne and Lewis spent together in The Mandarins’, the novel dedicated to Algren: ‘embarrassment, impatience, misunderstanding, fatigue, and finally the intoxication of deep understanding’. The next day he gave her a ‘clunky silver band’, as Bair calls it, a ...”

“... herself employed in speaking with Virginia Moore and Ellmann,’ Saddlemyer writes. In 1961, when Norman Jeffares was writing his introduction to Yeats’s Selected Poems, she wrote to him: ‘I dislike your use of the word “Fake” . . . I told you this before & you had a happier phrasing in your book. However, I cannot ask you to alter this. The word ...”

“... described by MacNeice’s poem is a nexus of relationships rather than a place apart. It has a Norman castle, a Scottish quarter and an Irish quarter (‘a slum for the blind and halt’). MacNeice, as ‘the rector’s son’, was ‘born to the anglican order,/Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’. Up the lane, at the lodge of an army ...”

“... strange contingencies and fantasies but has very little to do with actual genealogical practice. Norman Rockwell’s 1959 cover for the Saturday Evening Post, Family Tree, has at the top of the tree an impeccably white baby – not surprising – one far whiter than might be expected from the swarthy and often disreputable ancestry sprouting up from the ...”

“... before?Not a biographer. I’d written studies, including a biographical thing about the poet Alun Lewis years earlier.I remember that: it was the preface of the collection of his stories and poems you edited.Yes, it’s quite a long piece. It took ages and involved the conventional sort of research, going to see his widow and so on. I’d done that many years ...”

“... it might just be never to have sex again, and die anyway. ‘The​ problem remains,’ Sean Day-Lewis wrote in the Daily Telegraph in 1982, ‘that Aids, or the “Gay Plague”, is not limited to active homosexuals.’ In both the US and the UK (which bought up to 60 per cent of its Factor VIII, a clotting agent used to treat haemophilia patients, from ...”

“... he was 62; Graham Greene, who survived him by a quarter of a century, received two thousand from Norman Sherry. These are huge tomes. Even such a minuscule figure as Kingsley Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of ...”