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“... with the question of whether the historic free constitution of the Anglo-Saxons had survived the Norman Conquest and feudalism. Did the ancient constitution persist into the present, as Whig antiquaries contended, or was there a feudal discontinuity in the course of English history, as argued by royalists and Tories? The debate that had most purchase on ...”

“... Paul, by refusing to take him along on this desultory pilgrimage. With two university colleagues, Norman and Alvin, he paddles into the wilderness and promptly drops his torch in the river. He has a disconcerting encounter with a raging, swearing hunter, who drags a deer through the woods in a collapsible wheelbarrow – a ‘one-man danse macabre’ – and ...”

“... in 1960, when Leslie Fiedler published Love and Death in the American Novel, four years after Norman Rush graduated from Swarthmore College, where he met the woman whose ‘heart, sensibility and intellect are so signally – if perforce esoterically – celebrated and exploited’ in the novels he would come to write, to cite the dedication to the first ...”

“... Confessions and Accusations’ included contributions concerning European history from Norman Cohn, Peter Brown, Keith Thomas and Alan Macfarlane, all professional historians. They were fully integrated with the contributions of the anthropologists. Since that date it has become increasingly common both in this country and elsewhere for historians ...”

“... people into her fiction more naturally than Monimbo manages with, for instance, Castro and Norman Mailer. Her good American English is laced with wisecracks, sad-funny like Woody Allen’s, clever-naive like Salinger’s. The English dialogue of Monimbo is very poor, by comparison. At one point, the Mossgrave Partnership attempts to create a ...”

“... drama, on the other hand, is largely silent, in the sense that it cannot be read off from the page. It is there, not in the text, but in staging and situations, like the mocking of York before his murder in Henry VI Part 3, or in the readiness to have at the centre of a scene an actor who doesn’t speak and is therefore non-existent on the ...”

“... the poem’s larger meanings in miniature. The sea and the sea-swift preside over almost every page: the one, ‘a wide page without metaphors’, swallowing history and drenching every West Indian ‘survivor with blessing’, the other mediating between the Old and New Worlds. Other images shadow the narrative and ...”

“... everyone does) misstatements of his own. Intellectuals have ‘scant regard for veracity’ on page 269. On the next page Sir Israel Gollancz ‘virtually created the English department at London University’. But there is no English department at London University, and Gollancz did not create the oldest of the English ...”

“... of adult life that remain to be learned; the photo and the friendship are shuffled into the past. Norman Mailer reported on the Liston-Patterson fight for Esquire in dispatches that were uncharacteristically equivocal. In his account, victory is Liston’s because Patterson fought like a man down with jaundice, but that does not prevent Liston from being ...”

“... of hair-raising numbers of drafts: five hundred pages’ worth, he told Gladwell, for the 31-page story that opens Brief Encounters. Yet it’s clear from that book that he isn’t in thrall to a vision of arid perfection. The chief sign that the stories have been worked over extensively is that there’s little fat on them, though the muscular plotting ...”

“... of some fine writing: Thomas McGuane’s The Longest Silence, Luke Jennings’s Blood Knots, Norman Maclean’s A River Runs through It, which begins: ‘In our family there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.’ Tom Fort’s Casting Shadows: Fish and Fishing in Britain may not qualify as ‘literature’; but it offers garrulous witness ...”

“... made him famous. He quickly came to command large advances. Here’s a sample – taken from Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie’s Life of H.G. Wells: The Time Traveller (1973) – of his subsequent dealings with publishers, in this case from 1899 to 1901: ‘For When the Sleeper Wakes he had £700 for the serial rights and £500 on account from Harper for the ...”

“... educated.’ Monroe was a reader. At the end of Fragments, we are given an array on a double-page spread of the covers of books from her collection (rather than, say, the costumes and jewellery we might have expected and which are on display at the Getty Images Gallery in London today). In one of her last letters to Ralph Greenson, her Los Angeles ...”

“... to Quentin Oates), managed to contain itself for three weeks, until the fourth possible book-page Thursday. It did, however, break silence the previous Thursday by announcing the forthcoming treat. The delay enabled the reviewer to follow the author’s recommendation, broadcast to the nation on both TV and radio, that the book should be read ...”

“... and disdain. My main aim is to try to get the public treated like rational human beings.’ On page 287, just over halfway through his book, Thompson announces that in 1971, Peter, then aged 33, had ‘completed the last truly substantial work he would ever write’. Far too much space is then devoted to his disintegration in drink and drugs, to his awful ...”