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“... and Lesbian Centre. (Margaret Thatcher may be impossible to displace as a totem of oppression, but John Major has been prime minister for a couple of years by the time the book begins.) The only actual gay character in the book, if you exclude the passing dreamboat in his van, is Chickie Jamieson, an elderly, unthreatening and neuter-seeming neighbour of the ...”

“... forbidden pleasure. Herschel Shawmut, maudit monologist of Saul Bellow’s story ‘Him with His Foot in His Mouth’, describes the impulse to speak his mind as ‘seizure, rapture, demonic possession, frenzy, Fatum, divine madness, or even solar storm’. Haunted in old age by his least forgivable outburst, Shawmut remembers how he and his friend Eddie ...”

“... a staff of 16, including a chef, a governess – he had no children – a maître d’hôtel, two foot servants, a washerwoman, three chauffeurs, three gardeners, three cooks and a valet de chambre. There, a world of dreamlike, amoral, atemporal artifice prevailed. Roussel would order that the entire day’s meals, prepared by an Escoffier-trained cook, be ...”

“... though for me it spoils the ‘line’ of the poem – was reinstated at the petitioning of John Berryman in For the Union Dead (1964); a revised version of that is printed as a separate poem called ‘Ovid and Caesar’s Daughter’ in History (1973); and now Bidart and Gewanter have unearthed a seven-stanza monster that was printed in the Kenyon ...”

“... the inauguration of the new Bavarian Parliament on 21 February. Going to the opening ceremony on foot, and heedless of the repeated threats to his life he had received since coming to power, he was confronted by an embittered, anti-semitic Bavarian aristocrat called Count Anton von Arco-Valley, who shot him dead. The moral renewal of Bavarian politics was ...”

“... by levelling a tax on every financial transaction. It has been embraced by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and 11 European countries plan to introduce something like it, called the Financial Transaction Tax. Britain will not be one of those countries while the Conservatives are in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to ...”

“... for their root causes. He took out a subscription to New Internationalist. He read Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Greg Palast. ‘It slowly dawned on me,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be a hidden hand behind seemingly random, unconnected events. I came to this realisation myself, long before hearing of the term “conspiracy theory” or “new world ...”

“... only be – imagined as black. ‘As the judge will not have failed to register,’ the journalist John Carlin writes in Chase Your Shadow: The Trials of Oscar Pistorius, ‘if his story were true – and even if it were not – the faceless intruder of his imagination had to have had a black face, because the fact was that for white people crime mostly did ...”

“... Prix of the fastest, whitest drugs available. He brushed aside compatriots/competitors like Elton John and called Mick Jagger the ‘sort of harmless bourgeois kind of evil one can accept with a shrug’. If pushed, this apprentice warlock could also recite Derek and Clive’s ‘The Worst Job I Ever Had’ by heart and generally came on like a twisted ...”

“... in those distant days about booby-traps, I wandered into a deserted hut with a trench, perhaps a foot deep, dug under a rickety bamboo bed. A rifle pit? Hardly, given its position – more likely a simple bomb shelter for the owner and his family. On the beaten earth floor was a sickle for harvesting rice, its handle work-polished and shiny. I was pondering ...”

“... coffee in a delicate teacup, apologising that the household was between butlers. ‘He was six foot three,’ he said of the previous incumbent. ‘He was tall enough to reach the windows.’ We went to the library, lined with 18th and 17th-century volumes and with a fine antique 20th-century electric heater in the fireplace. Lord Townshend showed me a ...”

“... and they were numerous, included both Fitzgeralds, the New York society hostess Muriel Draper, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Nancy Mitford, Dawn Powell, even Mary McCarthy, whose rivalrousness towards other intellectual women is legendary. The fact that Murphy seems to have been one of the kindliest people on earth no doubt only magnified her ...”

“... making a patronising show of it, and stayed to tell a good story about Christopher Hill and John Sparrow, and of how he’d been the unwitting agent of a quarrel between them, while ignoring an ambitious and possessive American professor who kept yelling ‘Eye-zay-ah! Eye-zay-ah!’ from across the room. (‘Yes,’ he murmured at the conclusion of the ...”

“... the master builder of a new town for coal-miners in Peterlee, County Durham. Yet as his biographer John Allan has shown, Lubetkin didn’t step back from his vocation till much later.2 Indeed, he was responsible for the overarching design of Cranbrook. Each month he would come up to London, sketchbook bulging with plans.Lubetkin and his protégés, backed by ...”

“... and blue and white china on shelves; beyond it was a series of kitchens. Straight ahead was the foot of the staircase and beyond it a drawing-room with blue-grey walls and reproduction furniture in a Louis XV style, including a grand piano by Erard painted with putti and other pinky figures and a bow-fronted display cabinet containing porcelain and ivory ...”