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“... us that lyrics can reward close attention without being recast. The book collects the words of Ian Curtis, the singer in Joy Division, who committed suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. Joy Division belonged to the scene that emerged into the space left behind by punk. They are now part of the global adolescent ether as well as a staple of middle ...”

“... grotty warehouse where the band rehearsed; most striking are those showing the band’s singer, Ian Curtis, pale and brooding, lit by dusty light. Cummins also photographed the band standing in the snow down by the cathedral, and on a bridge overlooking Hulme, a huge 1960s housing estate. The four band members looked like refugees. Morrissey of The ...”

“... well share something with earlier singers of the unhomely and uncanny, from Thomas De Quincey to Ian Curtis. His Earth, like theirs, is a purgatory where anything can happen and no one can leave: ‘My brother is hanging from the branches/Hanging or swimming/Our T-shirts absolutely blaze.’ He entitled his second book Flies because they thrive on dead ...”

“... Peter Saville never closes his eyes, that he is never quite asleep. As Joy Division’s singer, Ian Curtis, dies and the group becomes New Order, as the 1980s and then the 1990s encroach, you see the covers of the records change as the music changes. The work moves from minimalism to advertising: by the time you get to 1993, and the album coverwork for ...”

“... spread for an encyclopedic mind like Keenan’s to reference (he is well known as a rock critic). Ian Curtis seems to have been the model for the band’s lead singer, Lucas Black, whose brain condition results in short-term memory loss, hence his copious written notes. The people around Black are either hopelessly attracted to his ‘endearing ...”

“... were full of androgyny and working-class escapism. We listened to Joy Division and wondered if Ian Curtis, the band’s singer, hadn’t died from too much guilt and too little time to put it right. When I hear their album Closer, I think of the Winter of Discontent and the layers of frost on the bedroom window. Some people imagine that when you try ...”

“... entirely credibly’, to Max’s mind. After debating suicide with one of his friends (when Ian Curtis of Joy Division hanged himself was this an artistic statement?), Wallace left Amherst again. If the story had a different ending – if Wallace were still around – we might see each breakdown as somehow pushing Wallace closer to his destiny as a ...”

“... We owe a large debt to the famous chapter on Robinson Crusoe in Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. Watt really made us use our wits about that novel and forced us to relate it to our most serious interests. Reread after twenty years, moreover, the chapter still has all of its intellectual impact and verve. The trouble is, I now find myself wanting to quarrel with almost every sentence in it ...”

“... enveloped me.’ And then there was the Polaroid that surfaced on social media last December, of Ian Curtis at the Macclesfield Unemployment Benefits Office’s Christmas drinks in 1978, a year and a half before he killed himself in May 1980. ‘The solitary urinal of male subjectivity’ is a wonderful expression Nina Power remembers Fisher using: and ...”

“... Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the book. None of these coat-brushers of genius is a household name: most publishers remain invisible. And many of ...”

“... Dawson, editor of the Times for 26 years, who almost worshipped Neville Chamberlain; Lionel Curtis, like Brand and Dawson, a fellow of All Souls, but unlike them often a grinding bore, who pursued impossible ideas such as the unification of the British Empire, and dreamed in Shanghai ‘of all nations knit in one robe for the Infinite Mind’; and ...”

“... the story of her life has been bound up with, and contorted by, his overbearing presence. Cathy Curtis, author of the first biography of Hardwick, has the opportunity to set this right, to begin at the beginning.Elizabeth Bruce Hardwick was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1916, the eighth of eleven children. Her siblings became teachers, post-office ...”

“... Do you have a friend who keeps a diary, a journal intime? If so, you’d better watch your mouth – indeed, watch everything about yourself, the way you dress, the way you eat, and what you eat, how much you drink, who pays the bill, and so on. Be careful, but be careful not to seem too careful: Dec. 14: Lunch with IH. Shifty fucker, absurdly self-conscious ...”

“... as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot down. Then there was the dream I had in which a snatched photo of the Trump-puff briefing notes of the former White House press secretary ...”

“... Kennedy finally sanctioned the invasion. Dallek points out that Jack and Bobby were great fans of Ian Fleming’s novels, and thought the key CIA operative pushing for action in Cuba a James Bond-like figure. This fondness for swashbuckling characters was to bring the Kennedys to grief more than once. As Dallek tells it, the debacle upset Kennedy far more ...”