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“... I was left, at the finish, with a feeling of nostalgia for the psychopathic ‘humour’ of a Jim Thompson or the more exuberant culture spread of Charles Willeford’s Cockfighter. Fate should hurt, it should embrace more than a spoiled romance. The affair at the heart of this novel must be with ‘Alligator’, the stinking pit bull, the sunken mud ...”

“... will not help us to understand anything about the politics of émigré groups. Better to turn to Robert Johnston’s excellent New Mecca, New Babylon: Paris and the Russian Exiles 1920-19451, which has languished in neglect, just possibly because it appeared from a Canadian university press. Both Johnston and ...”

“... Delmore Schwartz, Truman Capote (on Kerouac: ‘that’s not writing, that’s type-writing’), Robert Brustein and James Dickey (‘Howl is the skin of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer thrown over the conventional maunderings of one type of American adolescent, who has discovered that machine civilisation has no interest in his having read Blake’). Riding ...”

“... 1982, Terry McCluskie and his friend Raymond Reynolds picked a fight with a total stranger, Robert Ford, and stabbed him to death. Ford was 15 years old and had just taken his girl-friend home after spending an evening at a local Citizens’ Band radio club. McCluskie, also 15, and Reynolds, 14, had spent the evening drinking and were on their way to a ...”

“... their ancient homeland. Hämäläinen relates the account given to the English explorer David Thompson by one of the Blackfeet Indians, Saahkómaapi. In around 1730, the Blackfeet heard that there were horses in Snake Indian country and that not far away was the body of a horse that had been killed by an arrow. They found the dead horse and gathered ...”

“... on Australian history was perhaps even greater than that of their British equivalents, Hill, Thompson, Hobsbawm and Rudé, since they were there at the beginning and hence in a position to shape the discipline along lines that codified the radical nationalist interpretation of Australian history. Even in his own lifetime, Bill Somerville’s hopes ...”

“... et ses ouvrages’, is plagiarised from two articles in the Southern Literary Messenger by John R. Thompson and John M. Daniel. Daniel’s article is plagiarised in its turn from Griswold’s obituary of Poe – a fraud within a fraud within a fraud. Traduttore: tradittore. If, as the Italians say, to translate is to traduce, isn’t plagiarism a peculiarly ...”

“... the cinema-owners; the idiocy involved in cutting films down, etc.’ An essay from 1976 praising Robert Altman’s Nashville begins with two and a half pages of honest rage at the philistine state of German film criticism, which has dwindled to the status of the listings guide. ‘As this sort of criticism writes about films only as something that you ...”

“... a model. Bill Connor, who would become the columnist ‘Cassandra’, was recruited from J. Walter Thompson, where he had been a copywriter. Cudlipp, who was now in London with Kemsley’s Sunday Chronicle, joined as assistant features editor. His brother Percy was by this time editor of the Evening Standard, but he seems never to have thought about giving his ...”

“... through a fraction of a degree and the centre of the arch drops a millimetre or so. Sinclair Thompson, the engineer who surveyed the church, takes the long view. If movement is ancient, very gradual and not accelerating, heroic measures – tie bars, underpinning – are not even considered. The good news is that St George’s is remarkably sound. It was ...”

“... steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical ...”

“... in view of the use which Strawson makes of his naturalism, may want to return to Hume will find Robert Fogelin’s Hume’s Skepticism in the Treatise of Human Nature a useful guide. Fogelin offers a detailed, though not systematically structured, account of the various sceptical arguments in the Treatise. In contrast to many recent interpreters, Fogelin ...”

“... underlies a variety of Wellesian peculiarities. To Bill Alland, a longtime Mercury colleague (Thompson in Citizen Kane, the shadowy reporter in search of Rosebud), it explains Welles’s difficulty memorising lines. Never quite knowing his lines prevented Welles from inhabiting a character, or ‘surrendering’ to it. ‘If he ever let himself go in a ...”

“... He had then been put through the media wringer as head of the Senate judiciary committee during Robert Bork’s failed nomination to the Supreme Court. In February 1988 he had a brain aneurysm, then a pulmonary embolism, and months later a second aneurysm. Beau was in his first year at the University of Pennsylvania, and it had been a lonely time for ...”

“... of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy legal barrage, after circulating an allegedly libellous proposal for his book. ‘I ...”