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“... Ge’s most daring attempt at an account of Chinese classical learning, presenting the scope of a long intellectual tradition and pointing up its limitations. Perhaps inevitably, it leaves out too much to be wholly persuasive.His two volumes on China’s intellectual history leave him far more room for manoeuvre. They describe the formation of an intellectual ...”

“... far above Proust. How much does such an advantage matter? Novels that scant or defy plot have a long and distinguished history – Sterne in the 18th century, Goncharov in the 19th, Rilke in the early 20th, dozens thereafter. Starting later, effectively in the interwar period, major work dispensing with characters became a regular feature of the literary ...”

“... himself – ‘the shape of a boy, and a funny boy at that’, as he told his early lover Pamela Hansford Johnson. ‘I’m like a baby in the dark,’ he explained to Henry Treece, an Apocalyptic poet who wrote the first critical book about him, and with whom Thomas had a long and revealing correspondence. Being ...”

“... in the staged act of seduction: the body does brazen, while the face remains convincingly bashful. Pamela Clarke Keogh’s Elvis: The Man. The Life. The Legend (2004) is mostly what you’d expect from an official biography (‘written with the assistance of Elvis Presley Enterprises’): a jaunty soft-pedal, wisps of sad cloud against lovely Hawaiian skies ...”

“... drew on his equally short first marriage in writing Look Back in Anger; when she saw the set, Pamela Lane’s first reaction was: ‘Oh no, not the ironing-board.’ He went on to write The Entertainer (in which Laurence Olivier played the lead), Luther (played by Albert Finney), Inadmissible Evidence (with Nicol Williamson) and A Patriot for Me ...”

“... anniversary of the military coup. There has now been civilian government for 17 years, exactly as long as the dictatorship lasted. The democratic transition was officially declared over last year by the Socialist president, Ricardo Lagos, after the reform of some of Pinochet’s most restrictive constitutional articles. This January, Michelle Bachelet, also ...”

“... Strapped to a trolley for a lethal injection, he actually assisted the executioners in their hour-long search for a viable vein in which to place the lethal catheter. (He thought they were doctors trying to cure him.)This, coupled with Clinton’s ostentatious membership of an all-white golf-club, strikes me as a more pressing issue of morals and ...”

“... poured his enormous talent into a ‘minor art’. Henry Fielding’s Shamela – just a smack at Pamela – was largely confined to mockery of its deadpan original, but his Tragedy of Tragedies; or, the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great was attuned to a broader climate of false feeling and the bombast that floated it. Gillray worked from a similar ...”

“... there is, inevitably, some talk of Beckett’s extra-marital amours, notably with Pamela Mitchell and Barbara Bray. It is admirably free of the gossipy and the titillating, although Knowlson’s sureness of touch deserts him on the topic of the young Beckett and prostitutes, his prose veering wildly between the disingenuously coy and the ...”

“... It’s a free-market economy out there, so of course there’s going to be violent pornography as long as there are people fucked up enough to want it. And of course there are people prepared to make it for them. The American writer Laura Kipnis warns against getting ‘teary-eyed about exploited pornography workers’ when you ‘haven’t thought much about ...”

“... barely four months, shot dead his American wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter, Lillian, with a long-barrelled Colt .22 revolver borrowed from his father-in-law’s gun collection. By the time the bodies were discovered in their house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, huddled together beneath a rumpled duvet in the brand-new four-poster bed bought by the couple ...”

“... The plural pronoun is a major device in the Blake biography. ‘Let us accompany him on one of his long walks,’ Ackroyd invites. ‘He would have worn a cloth coat, sheepskin breeches and stockings with knee buckles; he was a typical child of his century, in this respect if no other.’ This is Ackroyd the facilitator, the magic lantern man. On our behalf he ...”

“... sleeves cut out, a pink triangle, quartz crystal pendant, grunge metal jewellery, and a six inch long marlin hook dangling around my neck on a length of heavy stainless steel chain. I decorated the set by draping my black leather biker jacket over my chair at the panellists’ table. The jacket had handcuffs on the left shoulder, rainbow freedom rings on the ...”

“... intemperate young man who set the Sunni and the Shia clerics at one another’s throats and before long Akbar sent a large expeditionary force, which took Kashmir in the summer of 1588. In the autumn the Emperor came to see the valley’s famous colours for himself.Habba Khatun’s situation changed dramatically after Akbar had her husband exiled. Unlike ...”