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“... to laugh about it in posters. Brother Anselm does not survive. The point of these stories is that nice people get polished off in the end. The good Brother is as nice as one can be in the circumstances, but before he is assumed into heaven or wherever, he spreads panic among the monks. How did it come about? What are they ...”

“... cent of American CEOs admitted to cheating at golf. Ben never played golf, or tennis, or bought a nice car, or a new house, or a nice suit, or went on vacation. He was austere.’ Marvin, on the other hand, liked to throw a little money around, and his taste in associates was not as conservative as his father’s. His ...”

“... European literature,’ wrote David Dabydeen in his essay ‘On not being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today’, ‘is littered with blacks like Man Friday, who falls to earth to worship Crusoe’s magical gun, or the savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... as if they’d just been done with Persil in a boil wash. One of those long summer days, my friend David and I got caught after stealing powdered floor cleaner from the local supermarket and pouring a huge mound of it in a doorway. The manager went in search of our mothers and made them pay for our strange artwork. They brought buckets, ...”

“... and an eagerly embraced opportunity for the people who’ve written books on the phenomenon. Like David Kalat’s A Critical History and Filmography of Toho’s Godzilla Series (1997) and Steve Ryfle’s feebly named Japan’s Favourite Mon-Star (1998), William Tsutsui’s Godzilla on My Mind profits from the haziness of most people’s recollections by ...”

“... have a relationship extending beyond their weekly group therapy. The youngest of the trio, David Mummery, was born in 1939 – an ominous year for London. He is a writer, obsessed with ‘the London under London’. In 1964, he began researching the city’s ‘lost’ tube lines and stations whose maps exist only in Masonic libraries. Mummery has ...”

“... David Bohm and Basil Hiley worked together for twenty years and between them developed a very unusual approach to quantum theory. Bohm died in 1992, but by then the book was almost complete. It is a magnificent monument to one of this century’s finest and most attractive minds. Painfully shy, and finding few fellow physicists willing to give a hearing to his new ideas, Bohm struggled for four decades to get beyond the orthodox views that he had himself defended in his Quantum Theory of 1951, long the subject’s standard textbook, but which later put him in mind of Escher’s Waterfall, whose careful construction cannot hide the fact that the water must at some stage be flowing uphill ...”

“... the case was over the legal costs would be reckoned at £750,000? The author of this book, Mr David Hooper (Eton and Balliol, the blurb tells us), practised at the bar before becoming a solicitor. He acts as an adviser to his present publishers, but, as the blurb also tells us, was not consulted about this particular book. This faintly ironic tone is ...”

“... thus a belief in the continued viability of the pits – to function at all. Francis Beckett and David Hencke quote one journalist’s description of a mining village near Barnsley: The village is not big, nearly all the 300 workers in the pit live here with their families. The wages were never very high … but they have cars and many own their little ...”

“... right words, I will never know, because he knows what I do not, how to keep things to himself. David Sedaris had invited me to read alongside him that night at UCLA, but before that we had the whole day. We took a cab first to Venice Beach, so that Jason could pay homage to Arnold Schwarzenegger. ‘Remember when he says that he feels the pump and it’s ...”

“... presence and status must on occasion have helped the legal processes forward.’ It’s a nice idea. But how, exactly, did this happen? Not surprisingly, Thompson finds the argument that Victoria was some sort of regal proto-feminist extremely difficult to sustain, and it is easy to see why a book originally commissioned for inclusion in the ‘Virago ...”

“... seems, for more or less any minor Axis celebrity who came to grief. And he was through with being nice to Churchill, that ‘sputtering tank of nicotine and/stale whiskey’. At the same time, he added a new opening to Canto 74, the first of the Pisan Cantos, expressing his sorrow at the death of Mussolini, who was executed in April 1945 while attempting to ...”

“... begins to falter. For she did not, as might have been expected, use Smith as a gateway to a nice fresh-faced Yalie called, say, Charles (‘Chip’) Staunton Webster III, with a law opening in Daddy’s firm in Boston and a summer place in New Hampshire. Instead, she took up acting, still very much a déclassé occupation, and decided to go to ...”

“... daughters of people pleased to see them spending their days in a shirt and tie, or in a blouse and nice skirt – not in overalls, like they were. Most of those who came in – men who used to be cheerful and all right – would sink into the chair with a handful of notices from the board: much-handled notices offering security jobs to those with ‘experience ...”