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“... universities from the mid-1960s onwards and, after separating from Jess Paley, married the writer Bob Nichols. She also published three books of fiction, though the novel her publishers hoped for never materialised. It seems fair to say that the short story was her form. The talent for nonchalance and compression that allows her to stretch out a brief chat to ...”

“... UCLA on the GI Bill, where he studied English and edited the Daily Bruin (Watergate conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann ...”

“... comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both sides,’ Trump said, comparing the marchers – who carried torches and chanted ‘Jews will not replace us’ – with those who had come out to protest against their presence.) In many quarters Kelly was taken to task. But when Trump’s ...”

“... my only contribution a muttered suggestion to Nick Hytner that Rupert Graves’s ad lib ‘I’m fine, I’m fine’ would be more in period if he said: ‘It is no matter, no matter.’ I watch Nigel H. rehearse the pisspot scene, then walk round the garden with Mark Thompson before buying some plants on sale in the ...”

“... Churchill’s indignation, and of his own spiritualist leanings, have been enough to make the case bob back into public consciousness every few years. As Malcolm Gaskill says, ‘we inherit ancestral tales reworked by each generation to make their truth powerful rather than precise, moral rather than empirical.’ Among the majority today, reverence for ...”

“... was one of the hits of the New Review cabaret at the ICA during Poetry International, 1973. ‘Bob Lull’ was first encountered there reading his newly composed ‘Notes for a Sonnet’. Later in the evening, he appeared, unable to leave well or ill alone, with the poem rewritten – ‘Revised Notes for a Sonnet’ – and then in a third appearance ...”

“... with sharp eyes that were glued to other people’s keyholes. That was why Brockett wrote such fine plays, such cruel plays.’ Like Valérie Seymour (a character based on the American lesbian Natalie Barney, a well-known hostess in Paris), Brockett doesn’t particularly want to be ‘normal’, believes that ‘loneliness’ is not inevitable and that ...”

“... Mrs William James, the formidable widow of Henry James’s elder brother, moving ‘in a cloud of fine discretions and hesitations and precautions’. She disliked Edith Wharton ‘thoroughly – and morbidly’, as Edel put it, and this meant that Wharton or anyone else deemed disreputable could not be involved in any aspect of the estate. Miss ...”

“... Even allowing for the low season, the coast has a desolate air. A few heads in bathing caps bob in the water. The seafood restaurant where I have lunch with the novelist Efrosini Camatsos, recently made redundant from her job as a university lecturer under an edict requiring all departments with more than 20 tenured staff to sack all teachers on ...”

“... It is another interior monologue, this time by a social worker at the end of his tether. Bob Munro is middle aged, fat, and a long-deserted husband. He hates himself and he hates his clients. His contribution to the cure of society’s ills he sees as no more use ‘than a fart in a hurricane’. Farts are very much to the point. The novel reeks with ...”

“... a place which rejoices in eccentricity. In their interviews with outsiders, the Irvings walked a fine line between insisting on the magic of Gef – ‘I am the fifth dimension! I am the eighth wonder of the world!’ he was said to have told them – and downplaying any suggestion that their visitor was anything other than flesh and blood and fur. The ...”

“... have been a clergyman in a Jane Austen novel.) A younger son of an eccentric landowning father, ‘Bob’ was born with a cleft palate which made comprehensible speech difficult for him and which, according to an associate, rendered him ‘seemingly little fitted for the utterance of any doctrine which could be deemed dangerous to social welfare’. His father ...”

“... after the surgery I vomit green gunk. ‘Don’t worry!’ I exclaim as I retch. ‘It will be fine! It’s just like The Exorcist,’ I say, before anyone else can. And so I spin away, back into the 1970s; I am easily parted from the present day. I remember the cinema queues and the evangelicals working their way along the jeering lines, trying to ...”

“... and vice-presidential nominees (even Sarah Palin), with the exception of the nonagenarian Bob Dole; the Bush family and anyone who held an important post in the administrations of either Bush; 11 of the 16 candidates who ran against Trump in the primaries; the two most prominent Republicans in the host state (Governor John Kasich and Senator Rob ...”

“... even those sceptical about conflating a writer’s life and work will find it difficult not to see Bob Brennan as the prototype for the jealous parents who haunt his daughter’s stories. It was on account of his writerly aspirations that Brennan was riven by guilt at her own success. ‘The pain radiated by the Envious One,’ she wrote to Maxwell, ‘is ...”