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“... called Aaron Boone. Afterwards, Boone told the press that Derek Jeter, the Yankees’ shortstop, a nice, inoffensive boy with cheekbones, the David Beckham of baseball, had promised him that ‘the ghosts would turn up eventually’. The Red Sox were at least spared the indignity of having their misfortunes blamed on some ...”

“... but to emotional intelligence’. Scientifically quantifiable emotional intelligence: that’s nice, and lucrative, and soothing for the employees in question, but it’s hardly time travel. Books like these are embarrassed shadows of the classic that defined the genre: J.W. Dunne’s An Experiment with Time (1927), which explains how – through attentive ...”

“... he chose to disparage, not least the work of former friends and rival contemporaries. When David Sylvester once asked what precisely was so deplorable about it (a ‘kind of caution’ perhaps?), Bacon’s response was studiedly offhand. ‘Well,’ he drawled, clearing his throat. ‘Well . . . Illustration surely means just illustrating the image ...”

“... film through their impersonations of what they are not, their acting of an act, so to speak: the nice, if rough-edged guy, and the genial businessman, the toast of the town. When they first meet up, Hale explains to his nephew how wonderful the locals are and how much he adores them. This isn’t exactly untrue. It’s just that he will like them better when ...”

“... Heller’s novel is not deliberately anti-Jewish. It is meant to be an autobiography of King David, the sweet singer of Israel, as told by a wisecracking New Yorker who fancies himself as a Jewish wit. Cocteau once said of the French child poet, Minou Drouet: ‘All children are poets, except Minou.’ Something like that might be said of Joseph Heller ...”

“... brings about a substantial (and welcome) reduction by referring only to some two hundred thousand. David Chandler explains that ever since he wrote his excellent book on the campaigns of Napoleon ten years ago, he has been inundated by requests for further information coming from the widest possible variety of people, all of whom are, as he puts it, ‘caught ...”

“... If this is the case when the ‘facts’ are right, how much more so when they are wrong? Hugh David’s book about Stephen Spender misleads in every way, factually as well as aesthetically, although in the general welter of disinformation it is barely possible to distinguish fact from treatment. As David’s previous ...”

“... to fillet felines these days.’ Some of us followed Doom because we thought we were too cool for David Blaine. Doom’s tricks were breath control, intricate rhyme schemes, a beating heart beneath the cold veneer, of which he gave us only occasional glimpses. Now you see it, now you don’t.In his six solo studio albums, numerous collaborations and ...”

“... West and Ecclesiastes) is given a round of applause. The best speech, regrettably, is David Frost’s, the best anecdote that Ned, questioned about the young man he had brought with him to supper, said: ‘If pressed, I would have to say he’s a Spanish waiter.’ Waiting at the lights this afternoon my bike slips out of my hands and slides to ...”

“... Kinnock out of the script for good. He is a young man – at 45, four years younger even than David Owen and David Steel; and the electoral college system, with its 40 per cent trade-union weighting, makes him reasonably invulnerable to coups from left or right. As long as he wants to go on leading the Labour Party ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London from the US (a little younger than ...”

“... or visited friends. It was some other affectless gorilla with a shoulder-holster. ‘Play-a nice children,’ he would say if things started going to hell in the sandpit. Apart from Gloriana and her mommy it was my mother who was most saddened by Anastasia’s untimely death. For with him went the best baby-sitter on earth. Mother knew that if ...”

“... that quoted respectful comments by American writers and historians, including Justin Kaplan and David Levering Lewis, who had participated in literary gatherings Mrs Bush initiated at the White House. Sittenfeld identified strongly with the portrayal of Laura Bush as a ‘voracious reader of fiction’, whose favourite novel was The Brothers Karamazov. And ...”

“... to the demonstrations which over the last two years have taken London, Seattle, Prague and Nice by storm and threaten every future international meeting of trade ministers. ‘The struggle between people and corporations,’ Monbiot writes, ‘will be the defining battle of the 21st century’; and he sets out to prove his point by telling a series of ...”

“... Luckily the speech of his characters breaks the rules: I hope you have tried all our nice foods, very good in Glit. There is a typical thing, a cream of cucumber made with the chords of a yog, or do you like perhaps to eat a brain? I hope you try our things. And how is your monetarism? ... Of course our disasters are more rational, we plan them ...”