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“... it, then manipulated its protagonists as puppeteer-in-chief’. (His favourite childhood book was Philip Gibbs’s Street of Adventure, in which it was written that ‘everything in life is but a peepshow’ and reporters were ‘the only real people in the world’.) Her second subject is the writer and criminologist Fryn Tennyson Jesse (great-niece of ...”

“... concern for the disadvantaged has not exactly endeared him to the Conservative Central Office. As Norman Tebbit replied, in words reminiscent of Walter Bagehot, it is not surprising that the Prince is so sympathetic towards the unemployed: he is by way of being one of them himself. All this is indicative of a deeper change in perceptions of royalty that has ...”

“... himself among the sons of the East Coast establishment, from William Burroughs of St Louis to Norman Mailer, the Brooklyn Jew. The Lampoon officers recognised the worker in the ‘cultural bumpkin’: he could put out the magazine single-handed while everyone else was horsing around and drinking, a vice Updike hardly ever indulged in to excess. (He was a ...”

“... experiences of royal husbands. They tended, it was felt, either to do too much or too little. Philip of Spain’s marriage to Mary Tudor had brought unwelcome foreign influence, while Queen Anne’s union with the ‘dull-brained, wine-bibing’ George of Denmark inspired little enthusiasm. Neither marriage was in living memory but Albert had arrived at a ...”

“... Had It So Good, the first volume of his monumental history of Britain since 1956, big guns like Norman Tebbit continued to lambast ‘the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s’. Three years later, Thatcher blamed the 1960s for ‘“the ...”

“... Tichbornism had in it a strong element of popular Toryism and nostalgia for the days before the Norman Yoke. Rather despairingly, McWilliam concludes that ‘the best way to think of it is as a form of pastiche.’ Pastiche of what exactly, and who is doing the pastiching? McWilliam repeatedly tries to anchor the affair to a unique set of historical ...”

“... an enthusiastic reviewer of later novels, didn’t much like this first one, but it did impress Philip Rahv, an editor of Partisan Review and, though less so, a fellow editor, Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald took the trouble, while returning a story sent in by a writer not yet sure of his own direction, to caution him against a tendency to ‘excess ...”

“... and author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. Tarnower at home might have been invented by Philip Roth, as an honorary member of the Tarnopol or Zuckerman families, the one who makes good, along slightly crossed tribal lines. With his Japanese-style suburban estate, his disaffected Belgian houseman, his appreciation of women half his age, his gourmet ...”

“... that goes back to Tom Paine, Milton and the Diggers. This move has structural similarities to the Norman Yoke theory of the 17th century, which claimed that the popular liberties of the Saxons had been (temporarily, for several centuries) suppressed by the alien laws of a conquering aristocracy. And this brings out how much Hitchens, cosmopolitan man of ...”

“... best commentary on this aspect of Hitchcock’s films (and on a great deal else besides) may be Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’, a poem about the specific, all-consuming fear aroused by the most general and unavoidable (that is to say, banal) of all conditions. This is the fear not so much of dying, as of death, of mortality. Waking at 4 a.m. to ‘soundless ...”

“... from our overseas commitments, our standing would fall to that of the Netherlands or Sweden (Sir Norman Brook et al, early 1958). Unless Britain took speedy action to improve technological education, Lord Cherwell warned, ‘she seems doomed to sink in wealth and influence to the level of Portugal within a generation’ (January 1956). Next stop Andorra, or ...”

“... be mistaken, as A Lifetime on Clouds was described to me, for the work of an Australian Catholic Philip Roth.If that were the case, however fine Tamarisk Row and its successor are (and they are), it’s unlikely you’d be reading this essay. Murnane’s international reputation, which has grown to speculations of a Nobel, rests on his novels and stories of ...”

“... Blake and others, and more unusual enthusiasms too, including the graphic ‘collage novels’ of Norman Rubington and the work of Sonia Delaunay. Delaunay wasn’t much in fashion at the time, but the abstracted expanding circles of her paintings perhaps inspired Boty’s attempts to depict her orgasms, which she described as ‘orange circular ...”

“... can be divided into three distinct periods: the first period was from their settlement with the Norman Conquest untill their expulsion from England in 1290; the middle period ends with unofficial toleration under Cromwell in 1655, when England was nominally Judenrein, although many individual Jews did make their way there; the last period shows the Jews in ...”

“... a fucked-out burn-out who still has a seductive way with words. To borrow a word from Norman Mailer, Tynan was a sexologue – an ideologue about sex. He was an admirer of the renegade psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, about whom he was writing a book-length study (never completed). With his once-voguish theories about armoured personalities and orgone ...”