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“... one Selznick employee thought Margaret Mitchell’s novel ‘ponderous trash’ and that another, John Van Druten, was sacked after calling it ‘a fine book for bellhops’. Well, there must be lots of bellhops. The world sales of the novel now total some ten million; and the film had already grossed $62 million by 1950. Not until the Sixties was it ...”

“... a sane, amusing, unintimidating introduction to the consequences of mathematical illiteracy, John Allen Paulos shows how a little arithmetic can cast light on the cohesiveness of cultures. He quotes an experiment in which the psychologist Stanley Milgrim gave each member of a randomly-selected group of people a document and a ‘target individual’ to ...”

“... In works with titles such as The Occult Philosophy, wise men and magi like Cornelius Agrippa and John Dee outlined in general and axiomatic form the elements of a high and secret knowledge which they claimed to have inherited from the past. This is exactly what O’Keefe has accomplished for his own misty past, instead of Orpheus, Hermes and Simon Magus, we ...”

“... This went badly awry. ‘If a noble family cannot rebuild their own castle,’ thundered John Ruskin, ‘in God’s name let them live in the nearest ditch till they can.’ The popular view that stately homes were part of the national heritage was now challenged by the Radical view that they were the national heritage, wrongly appropriated. With an ...”

“... worldwide is another giveaway of their provenance, since, according to the Chicago Tribune’s John Crewdson, ‘only nine companies’ – including Premier Executive Transport Services – ‘have Pentagon permission to land aircraft at military bases worldwide.’ The US Army’s Aeronautical Services Agency publishes an annual unclassified list of ...”

“... to have read a lot of books. She refers to Joseph Conrad, William Golding’s Pincher Martin and Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Morvern’s palette has expanded to encompass the Updikean spectrum of emerald, cyan and tangerine. She uses the word ‘whorls’. That this was Alan Warner’s voice rather than Morvern Callar’s seemed confirmed when someone ...”

“... disembodied voiceover as we accompany the poets to Minneapolis’s Washington Avenue Bridge, where John Berryman jumped to his death; the White Horse Tavern, where Dylan Thomas supposedly drank the 18 whiskeys that killed him; 23 Fitzroy Road, where Plath laid her head on a folded towel in the gas oven; Missolonghi, per Byron; Rome, to the Keats-Shelley ...”

“... success, and ending with some surprisingly detached reflections on Mrs Thatcher from the pen of John Vincent. As a final savoury, Tony Benn, Michael Fraser, David Marquand and David Butler sum up the entire era. The argument starts with the first and by some way the best piece in the collection, Paul Addison’s essay on ‘The Road from 1945’. Addison ...”

“... rates. Before the conference started, journalists and paying punters milled around the foyer. Tom Walker, a 37-year-old online salesman, had made a special trip from Ayrshire. ‘There just aren’t enough events like this,’ he said. He became politically active campaigning for Brexit. In a lull in our conversation he read aloud the Bible inscriptions ...”

“... the one hand, he was a kind of comedian, a learned buffoon, a butt for courtly wits and poets like John Donne and Ben Jonson, who both knew him well. On the other hand, he was the immensely tough and courageous traveller, whose remarkable journeys through Europe and Asia were made almost entirely on foot. This is the boast entailed in his favourite description ...”

“... a top examinee and an important official at the age of 30 in the East India Office, sitting beside John Stuart Mill and Bentham. There he is, convulsing the office with his stories and talk, and yet he inaugurates the first steamboat service to India. The amateur becomes the professional. The steamboats were an important service to the Empire, though one, he ...”

“... Frances Yates, Rykwert discusses the interest in architecture shown by the Elizabethan magus John Dec and the possible connection between Dee and Inigo Jones. So far, so good: Perrault had not written yet. But it turns out – another exciting discovery – that Sir Christopher Wren, despite his admiration for Perrault’s writings, was also interested ...”

“... North’ and the man who hid from his creditors under Blackwood’s table. ‘North’ (John Wilson) had invited De Quincey to Edinburgh, in the hope that he would provide him with lectures for his Edinburgh Professorship of Moral Philosophy – a subject of which Wilson knew little and practised less. De Quincey lived in or near Edinburgh for over ...”

“... fictive, prospective or real (floods, kidnappings, automobile accidents, the Beast of St John); fairy tales; shopping malls, hospitals, high street stores, dinner parties, graves. All these places and events can break people, or contain those who are broken. She can even put many of these things in the same poem. ‘Sensual Pleasures’ (another new ...”

“... until the last half of this, the third game. A bit like not bothering to vote for Jospin say I. John was watching the game in a local French café called Gastro. On the final whistle he commiserated with the owner. ‘Of course,’ shrugged M. le Patron, in a what-do-you-expect way, ‘most of the team play in England.’ Superb. The Irish record in World ...”