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“... Did the fact that he came from Switzerland’s drabbest town have something to do with it? La Chaux-de-Fonds has little excuse. Lifted high in a bowl of the Jura, it is fringed by mountains and pines, in which Emeritus Professor Allen Brooks, musing from the tranquillity of retirement, revels at leisure ...”

“... but nobody really seemed to care. As Watson and Martin Hickman make plain in Dial M for Murdoch (Allen Lane, £20), the news that News International was involved in systemic corruption wasn’t news to everyone: not to the police, not to many politicians, not to much of the press. It’s just that the people who knew about it didn’t want to talk about ...”

“... up Tynan’s book and much of Gilliatt’s. Tynan is here bent on recommending his new form, which he does by insinuating that it is an older activity than his former practice of reviewing: Many publishers believe that modern readers care only for long-distance, marathon writing, and that there is no room left for such middle-distance, eight hundred metre ...”

“... inquisitiveness that makes the action ambiguous. Cagney is charged with restlessness, and yet he always contrives to discharge the agitation daintily or with conscious style. Watch him listen to other players and you will realise how often other actors cruised. If he is frightening it is because of that attentiveness ...”

“... collective enjoyment. The rarity is to find something not like a ‘poem’, more like a person. Allen Curnow, like the later Auden, has the gift of making a contraption with a guy inside it, someone whose interest is not that of being a poet. Nor of coming from New Zealand. He has his own country, caught in a transparent ...”

“... I don’t own a computer, have no idea how to work one,’ Woody Allen told an interviewer recently. Most of us have come to find computers indispensable, but he manages to have a productive life without one. Are those of us with computers really better off? There are two ways that computers might add to our wellbeing ...”

“... Iknew Buster Keaton.​ I carried his ukulele to Grand Central Station, where he and my father, Bert Lahr, were boarding a train to Toronto to make a film called Ten Girls Ago. It was 1962; I was 21, old enough to know I was walking with two comedy legends. In my mind’s eye, I can still see the platform and the waiting silver carriage ...”

“... a few excisions. Ford was a follower of F.R. Leavis, and it could be argued that through the Guide he did more than anyone except Leavis himself to disseminate Leavisite views. This was an achievement at the practical rather than the theoretical level, since Ford came later than the pioneer, innovative group which in the Thirties shared with the Leavises the ...”

“... macabre,’ Dennis Nilsen, the biggest multiple killer in British criminal history, has remarked. He went on: The population at large is neither ‘ordinary’ or ‘normal’. They seem to be bound together by a collective ignorance of themselves and what they are. They have, every one of them, got their deep dark thoughts with many a skeleton rattling in ...”

“... to Robin Hood, one of the gangsters asks: ‘Who’s Robin Hood?’ And another replies: ‘Well, he was a hood, some Englishman who lived long ago and had an operation going for him in the forest. And I guess the "robin” means he stole birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ...”

“... In the summer​ of 1935, when he was 18, Robert Lowell and two friends from St Mark’s School – Blair Clark and Frank Parker – rented a house in Nantucket. Under Lowell’s direction, they studied the Bible (with special attention to the Book of Job) and ate cereal with raw honey and ‘badly’ cooked eels ...”

“... his eyesight, probably as a result of syphilis, and hoped the Writing Ball would help. But first he had to master touch-typing. He soon gave up on the experiment. But he noticed that when he wrote down his thoughts on the Malling-Hansen his writing ...”

“... Only person I had then was Uncle John who was rarely there or sober. The disillusion when he hit the kid and dog was Awful for me. The year or so left was lonely hell. Only reason i’m telling you this is that i know i have dealt with these few years ad nauseum. Problem is everytime I am scared, hurt, miserable, lonely or in trouble I go straight ...”

“... and delivered a history lesson. ‘The lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War,’ he said. ‘Men and women of good faith on both sides made their stand where their conscience had them make their stand.’ Kelly’s comments echoed the president’s remarks in the rally’s immediate aftermath. (‘Some very fine people on both sides,’ Trump ...”

“... The woman is dressed as a giant rabbit and refuses to take the reporter seriously. When he asks her to remove ‘the bunny head’ she complies, only to reveal that she is wearing a vampire mask under it. My recent interview with Frederick Seidel, ostensibly for the Village Voice, was marginally less successful than this. In keeping with his ...”