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“... said to be true to the spirit of its predecessors, however: it uses a script based on the one Douglas Adams was working on when he died in 2001; it stars an Englishman (Martin Freeman, perhaps still better known as Tim from The Office) as the picaresque hero, Arthur Dent; and it has the same theme tune. I say ‘it’s said’ because I haven’t ...”

“... actually part of the computer – but that it is an intelligible sentence at all is absurd. Douglas Adams co-wrote The Meaning of Liff, a mock-dictionary in which place names are assigned to familiar phenomena which ought to have names but don’t – woking, for example, is ‘standing in the kitchen wondering what you came in here for’. It is ...”

“... without the ‘very’. A poet called Lord Alfred Tennyson, not to be confused with Alfred Lord Douglas, briefly surfaces like the Kraken; the poem is here a Mort and there a Morte. Max Beerbohm’s parody of Henry James is readily and roughly transcribed: for ‘caught in her tone’, read ‘caught her tone’; for ‘feverish’, read ...”

“... the author’s volition. By contrast with this classic central statement, two recent releases from Douglas Adams and the late Philip K. Dick take station as ‘outriders’. Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has the four familiar books in one volume. It looks, to be blunt, like a highly entertaining case ...”

“... mating call (which can be heard at http://www.bigjude.com/Page8.html) was compared by the late Douglas Adams to the opening bars of a Pink Floyd album, is unique among parrots in having a mating system in which females choose between males gathered together on a common display ground. Now that only fifty wild individuals are left in scattered ...”

“... do not exist, often with bibliographical exactness: it continues in the fictions of Italo Calvino, Douglas Adams, Roberto Bolaño and Mark Z. Danielewski, among many others. The Polish science fiction writer and author of Solaris, Stanisław Lem, wrote long introductions to four imaginary books in Imaginary Magnitude (1973) and a whole volume of reviews ...”

“... up and down his pages because he writes about the fact of fantasy: he knows what he’s doing. Douglas Adams, on the other hand, in one of his later novels, has a pretty, charming, 2CV-driving female character undress, run a bath full of all the salts and soaps she can find, and climb in to soak after a long day fighting off vultures. You can almost ...”

“... Boswell and Samuel Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell ...”

“... the pilot in the Montgolfier brothers’ balloon in 1783. Nature needed no exaggeration either. As Douglas Adams once said, ‘isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?’ That was in 1979 – but it was possible to think the same thing in 1579.There were many areas of ...”

“... equals money if it brings more readers/viewers/listeners to the subject’s work. Thus when Kirk Douglas or Richard Adams or Melvyn Bragg ‘agrees to see me’ shortly before their new book comes out, they are not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts but in hopes of a socking great plug. And even if I say their ...”

“... 20th-century non-linear-dynamical point of view. It’s a funny book, Time Bandits crossed with Douglas Adams. It’s an enormous, systematic study of order and disorder, which moves to the strange, slow rhythms of what historians call the longue durée. Although the bulk of its action seems to happen in North America, it is also about 18th-century ...”

“... one of the illusions of August 1914. Another was the generals’ belief in a war of movement. In Douglas Haig Gerald De Groot examines the British general who suffered the greatest military frustration, as the Western Front stubbornly remained an immobile trench war. Before 1914 Haig was one of the foremost believers in the continued battle-winning capacity ...”

“... Clifford was looking for a cause – especially if it had a few million dollars attached to it. Adams and Frantz describe in detail one deal in which Clifford and his partner Robert Altman, well-known in Washington social circles since he was married to Wonderwoman, bought and sold shares through BCCI and ended up with $9.8m in their pockets. Kerry reveals ...”

“... uncle Thomas discovered when he was imprisoned in 1536 after a rash engagement to Lady Margaret Douglas, who also had royal blood. Surrey was unimaginably grand, but was also not unjustly described by John Barlowe, Dean of Westbury as ‘the most foolish proud boy that is in England’. His actions often tread the dividing line between brattishness and ...”

“... and Caroline’s half-brother, Blaise. The most important historical figures are Hay, Henry Adams, William Randolph Hearst, and Presidents McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, though there are cameo appearances from many others, including Adams’s brother Brooks, author of the imperialist manifesto Law of Civilisation ...”