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“... Europe, would come to the Zam Zam, sometimes for the martinis but usually to be thrown out. When David Letterman came to town to do a week of shows his advance people phoned Bruno to see if he would throw Letterman out of the bar on the show. ‘No, I’m sorry, thank you,’ Bruno said over the phone. ‘Who’s ...”

“... of dealing with Britain’s rubbish. ‘Everything is checked,’ she says. Her colleague Peter Robinson chips in. ‘The whole area of waste handling and management is so much more technically sound in the UK than it ever was before.’ He smiles. ‘This country’s history of landfill has actually been quite safe; it has served us well.’ On the walls ...”

“... that her real name is June Hovick. Another one was Danny Kaye, and we found out his real name was David Daniel Kamirsky ... There is one who calls himself Edward G. Robinson. His real name is Emanuel Goldenberg. There is another one here who calls himself Melvyn Douglas whose name is Melvyn Desselberg. There are others too ...”

“... nursing home, while ex-husbands, like the one in ‘Lichen’, show up with younger girlfriends: David in that story has two, one he brings along, and another shown only in a nude snapshot he presents to his ex-wife; it fades in the sun, so that the pubic hair resembles lichen, a metaphor for the pointlessness of male questing after youthful female ...”

“... a poet’), or Defoe: the new master of a form that will all but replace poetry for a century, as Robinson Crusoe in its extreme shipwrecked mundanity throws away every heroic convention that preceded it. Robinson was born the year after Dryden, 1632. If there is, in the age of Defoe, any way forward for real poets, then it ...”

“... died. His name is above the title: in yellow print, superimposed over the famous (and uncredited) David Bailey portrait, the Sixties icon that makes the Twins look like two portions of Robert Maxwell, split by an axe. The Krays allowed Pearson the status of a nightclub photographer with a flash in his fist. He was supposed to offer his contribution to their ...”

“... contemporaries – who included James Baldwin, Paddy Chayefsky, Richard Avedon and Sugar Ray Robinson – the only one to make an impression on him was a classmate who used an easy flow of patter to sell his fellow students subscriptions to the New York Times.At seventeen he found a job at Timely Comics, which later became Marvel, through a family ...”

“... as further telegrams, even more alarming, came from Herzog. In 1944, the US envoy in Dublin, David Gray, discussed President Roosevelt’s War Refugee Board with the Irish Government and expressed the US Administration’s delight when the Irish Government agreed in principle to take 500 Jewish refugee children. When there was a question of accepting ...”

“... and no reckoning with their own deep violence was ever likely to occur. Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina was due to speak that first day, a black man deeply committed to the happy fiction that Donald Trump and his followers are not at all racist. But Robinson goes the extra mile. He’s a prince of ...”

“... markets of the third quarter of the century, thereby leading to what Jack Gallagher and Ronald Robinson called informal empire or ‘the imperialism of Free Trade’. Thereafter, Britain’s determination not to copy the other European states and America, by retreating into protective tariffs, is often seen as an enlightened attachment to principle; but it ...”

“... Did the sweet shop inspire the naming of Miss Pynsent, the dressmaker who brings up Hyacinth Robinson in The Princess Casamassima (1886)? Surely Hyacinth himself, who remains diminutive even when fully grown, is what the small boy might have been without James’s privileges: an aspiring writer who has to work as a mere bookbinder, he shares with his ...”

“... in a house that had hardly any books. All he could remember reading were the first 11 pages of Robinson Crusoe – the rest of the book had disappeared. That memory is suggestive: in Chapter 1, entitled ‘Start in Life’, Crusoe speaks of two brothers he lost before he resolved, at 18, to go to sea. Ammons had become an only son and was the same age as ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... be more empowering than to sit looking at an immaculate rectangle of water, a three-dimensional David Hockney which will never be disturbed by a thrashing alien presence? Neighbours lacking this obscene quantum of liquidity might well complain about the noise, the dust, the inconvenience and the damage to their foundations. It doesn’t signify. And ...”

“... some twenty years ago, the need for an abridged version of SND (the editor of that dictionary, David Murison, wrote to me that by coincidence this had been discussed at the last meeting of the dictionary council, and referred for further consideration), I never expected that my wishes would be met so sumptuously. Since it has been the Year of the Woman for ...”