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“... Williams’s preferential treatment at Oxford University Press, where Walton was otherwise the star. It made him susceptible to attempts at poaching by Boosey & Hawkes – a long, furious letter to Walton from Hubert Foss, his OUP publisher, written in 1937 at the time of the first such overture, is further new material – though there he would have been ...”

“... predicament wasn’t too far from my own struggles as both a theatre critic and the son of a movie star. Now, as the plane touched down on the sun-bleached runway, I felt an exquisite excitement. I was out of the audience. I was in the game. I was a player. Hooray indeed.I was living in a cottage at the back of a friend’s walled California Tudor house in ...”

“... art going popular, but Peter Blake’s and David Hockney’s mature commercial appearances rated star billing and held their own in record stores and poster shops. Minton did not have Piper’s or Ravilious’s Betjemanesque delight in the look of England, but his Death of Nelson, which at first glance seems to hark back with mad presumption to David and ...”

“... of Rutland eventually acquiesced in Duff’s marriage to his youngest daughter, by then a rising star in the fashionable theatre. So began an exceptionally happy marriage, with each partner learning to cultivate excitement and success from the vitality and ambition of the other. From the beginning it seems that Duff was unfaithful, but the proprieties were ...”

“... be somebody, maybe even one of the Real People. ‘He cannot live without an admiring audience,’ Christopher Lasch writes of the pathological narcissist: ‘The popularity of the confessional mode testifies, of course, to the new narcissism that runs all through American culture.’ In The Culture of Narcissism Lasch argues that the recent fascination with ...”

“... crime and graffiti. Glass in hand, Capote was photographed with every shipping tycoon and movie star of his era. They were competing with Hollywood, and they knew it. And they were competing with the previous generation. The giant legend of Hemingway, for all the holes that would be shot in it, established a measure of fame, of sheer presence on the ...”

“... unblushingly tried. He committed to a debtors’ prison (where he died) the by then demented poet Christopher Smart whom in past years he had befriended and helped. When the Duchess of Kingston, a close friend of his former patron the Duke of Newcastle, was indicted before the House of Lords for bigamy, Mansfield took the unprecedented step of granting her ...”

“... of the width of a proton, proportionally equivalent to changing the distance to our nearest star by a hair’s width. The announcement was greeted with a sense of wonder at human ingenuity, even by those who neither understood the physics involved, nor why the result was so important. How, historically, did we arrive at a situation in which science ...”

“... not the case anymore, but you know, he’s a very engaging guy … And he’s a real star. Do brilliantly. And he got selected. Now, just as an indication of how the party’s changing, Wilfred got selected for Chippenham – white, middle-class, you know, deepest Wiltshire. And Wilfred tooled up to the selection meeting, wearing his jeans and an ...”

“... of breastplates and turbans that enlarge Rembrandt’s studio stock in the 1630s. Next, the new star of Dutch art looks his predecessors in the eye. He strikes poses and dons funny hats so as to align himself with the artistic legends of the preceding century – Titian, Dürer, Raphael. Finally, there is his own legend to promote. A piece of the master’s ...”

“... his bewilderment, totally eclipsed by Cagney and co as gangster films hit their stride. Of a child-star called Baby Richard Headrick: dunked in a fountain thirty times in an afternoon, shivering and fighting back tears, and with his father standing guard. Schulberg’s detached yet sympathetic gaze seems to have been sharply focused almost since birth, and ...”

“... be willing, at any rate, to concede that Ovett’s intransigence is defensive in intent (though Christopher Brasher of the Observer has sometimes come close to suggesting otherwise). It must be said that the press, and to a lesser extent television, have their problems when it comes to athletics. Not the least of the difficulties is that most discussions of ...”

“... student, then a junior academic, in the Cambridge English faculty. There were one or two other star lecturers, but Griffiths was the top performer. (He was also renowned for his inspiring or scornful supervision of students, his brilliant, booze-fuelled talk, his satirical rudeness, his ability to win disciples and his bad behaviour.) It wasn’t uncommon ...”

“... Thomas, he was an eager perpetrator of New Romanticism. Watkins was at Repton and Cambridge with Christopher Isherwood, and makes a cameo appearance as the gullible Percival in Lions and Shadows. Nevertheless, he had little in common with the Auden generation or with Cambridge. His last eighteen months at school were, in retrospect, an idyll, but the course ...”

“... the coach had led him to open up with me, with such awkward results. Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, I believe that there are certain statements and positions you just can’t agree with. Unlike them, though, I have a pathological inability to take extreme opinions or actions, including religious ones, at face value. I don’t only mean ...”