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“... buff’s guide to his most interesting films, and a much better book than its title suggests, Damien Love describes Mitchum’s less-is-more style of acting as ‘a fundamental understanding of what the minute scrutiny of that close camera and the magnification of that big screen could do’. Like many male screen icons of his generation, Mitchum was ...”

“... go along to Bond Street and see the butterflies hatching in some disused premises that the artist Damien Hirst had rented. ‘It’s a truly beautiful installation,’ she enthused. She described it: the dishes of melting nectar, the chrysalises stuck to the walls, and the startling epiphanies as the creatures unfurled, fluttered ...”

“... generation of artists, who first came to public notice in 1988 with the Freeze show organised by Damien Hirst, were the beneficiaries of the hard work of the St Ives Group, the Independent Group, the Royal College Pop artists and so on, all of whom had successively edged British art into a position where it could at last compete in the world of international ...”

“... version of this idea: you know who you are when you’re singing in the rain; you know you’re in love when it’s swing time, when the right person says: ‘Shall we dance?’ Some musicals, especially stage musicals, don’t play with the idea very hard, and rest their case on the commercial fact: the characters break into song and dance because that’s ...”

“... his son. ‘As long as it did not require too much of his time.’ In such a world, the receipt of love is no more guaranteed than a salary. Flexibility rather than loyalty is the order of the day, and even those who win comfortable and prestigious positions as love objects must worry constantly about dismissal without ...”

“... pornography as Norman Rockwell might have painted it. There are installations, such as Damien Hirst’s table of surgical instruments below photographs of a smashed eye and smashed limbs. There are DVD projections and sculpture. This disparate collection has been selected (and in some cases created) as a response to Ballard’s ‘enormous cultural ...”

“... devil-figures and witches (like Dougal Douglas in The Ballad of Peckham Rye and Margaret Damien in The Symposium), who, in their love of plotting, are linked analogically with the plotting novelist; novels which announce their own fictionality, often by making the novel’s hero or heroine a writer, so that he or ...”

“... a defence of the art market, of art as something which a dealer sells to people who genuinely love it, rather than art as something to be exhibited in museums by curators or financed by bureaucrats at the Arts Council or the National Endowment for the Arts. Hickey was once a dealer himself and he dwells lovingly on his days running a gallery: a ‘Mom and ...”

“... he can’t agree that it should be final: marriage vows are made under the influence of amorous love, which is ‘a state of mental imbalance’, and ‘there is a reservation, under Catholic laws of annulment, that allows for madness.’ His logic is unyielding, and it’s appropriate that he should remind us, in the course of this speech, that Catholics ...”

“... characters are released from their commodified perceptions into feelings that count as ‘real’: love and/or untrammelled awareness of the natural world. The sun emerges from its shrink wrapper, and the novel (Miss Wyoming, 2000) that began by slapping parking tickets on people’s irises ends up rescinding them: ‘Susan’s eyes were as wide and open as ...”

“... have failed in life,’ or wondering how to work off, on the next interviewer, a variation of ‘I love Americans but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is they never try to talk English.’ The Saki joke most venerated down the generations – ‘The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go she went’ – appears in the first tale ...”

“... or MDMA, also known as Ecstasy’) from out-of-print 1991, though they could settle for love dove meaning the same thing in the second edition. Contemporaries, however, should beware. A dictionary is, by definition, no way to find out how to be hip (a word not found in either edition, but used, according to the SOED, by both Erica Jong and Shiva ...”

“... candidate. The wider implication is that a more authentic, less mediated world has been lost. Damien Hirst’s diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God, features at length and stares from the cover of the hardback, making its point about the glittering mask of celebrity and the deathly void it conceals. A more ...”

“... design as a malign scheme of social control, or the affectless mixer-machine colour binges of Damien Hirst’s ‘spin’ and ‘spot’ paintings. Such sardonic palettes backhandedly acknowledge some past age of innocence, a heyday of fervent belief. When was colour? Should we think back to the passion of postwar Americans for acrylic and metallic ...”

“... crowd celebrating a feast day. She is pushed into the arms of a stranger, with whom she falls in love, only to be dragged away from him again by the crowd, ‘who dance a mad farandole’ that drowns out the sound of her beloved’s voice. She ‘clenches her fists’ and curses the crowd for having stolen her love. You ...”