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“... of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of excited fancies.’ Jack Matthews’s collection of stories, Ghostly Populations, contributes to the study of these questions; an earlier collection was entitled Dubious Persuasions. Matthews also contributes, as does Peter Taylor, to an excellent American fiction of the present ...”

“... their chosen moments in the history of American airtime. Elvis Presley’s top half on the Ed Sullivan Show; John F. Kennedy’s live debate with a melting Richard Nixon; an early episode of I Love Lucy; a dinner-table scene from The Waltons; Neil Armstrong’s One Small Step; the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald; the pilot show of Roseanne. Each viewer wore ...”

“... for a chance to ease him out. But, of course, Hoover had voluminous files on Bobby’s brother Jack, going all the way back to tape-recordings of Jack in bed with Inga Arvad (Miss Denmark) in 1942. (Indeed it seems possible that Jack was hurriedly shipped off to war on PT-109 largely ...”

“... comedians, picking up awards, starring in feature films, gaining American exposure on The Ed Sullivan Show. But it is their shows for the BBC in the Seventies that will be remembered. In his influential Observer profile in 1973, Tynan likened the two to a classic sports car developing through three distinct phases. From the Mark I of the variety stage, a ...”

“... and took some Tylenol just to get me started. I watched daytime television in my room ... I drank Jack Daniel’s and Wild Turkey, Stolichnaya and Kamchatka, Southern Comfort and Jim Beam, Gallo and tawny port, Coors and Bud. The answer is just turning eight. Emma in What’s Wrong with America spends torrid nights of love with her savings-and-loan manager ...”

“... have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three ...”

“... inventive Boris Vian, himself an accomplished trumpeter, faked a black identity as one ‘Vernon Sullivan’, author of the spoof crime novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes. The American writers themselves fared variously in Paris. Himes prospered, while simultaneously raising and ditching the question of ‘race’ with the unforgettable question: ‘What ...”

“... use of rhyme. Unsurprisingly, examples of pure verse are hard to find. Garrison Keillor’s ‘Mrs Sullivan’, however, is the perfect instance, das Ding an sich: its message is wryly feminist and its medium, when Keillor reads it on radio, is the purest prose anecdote because the enjambment ensures that the unobtrusive rhymes are utterly ...”

“... way of office life in 1960 as North by Northwest perfectly depicts the fantasised alternative), Jack Lemmon gets close to his boss, which gets him ever closer to a key to the executive washroom, by lending his apartment to executives for their extra-marital assignations. Until love (or an understanding of his place in feudal America) turns him into his own ...”

“... of Iraq, sat in the garden of his Baghdad villa while a young internet entrepreneur called Jack Dorsey tried to persuade him that he needed to be on Twitter. Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, was in Baghdad at the invitation of the State Department. Over the previous three days, he and eight other Silicon Valley bigwigs, kitted out with helmets and flak ...”

“... the judge not to watch television or read newspaper reports of the trial.’ According to Ronald Sullivan, the Times reporter who covered the trial, London had ‘mastered the art of television interviews, allowing him to get his version of events on the local news, which the unsequestered jurors might watch even though the judge says they can’t’. The ...”

“... introduction to the new edition of A Child of the Century, David Denby compares him with Arthur Sullivan, who wanted to be the English Schumann and wrote many now forgotten symphonic works, while everyone remembers Patience and HMS Pinafore. Hecht didn’t become a great novelist or playwright, but he found that he excelled at screenwriting, which he ...”

“... strain in Remnick’s book, which recalls incidents from boxing’s racist past, as when the great Jack Johnson entered the ring to chants of ‘Kill the nigger!’ Ali’s antics caused a sort of panic, disguised as abhorrence of his undignified behaviour. The conservative fight establishment still held Joe ‘He’s a credit to his race, the human ...”

“... I will attempt to overcome, tends towards the more cynical view ascribed to William Burroughs by Jack Kerouac. ‘When you start separating the people from their rivers what have you got? Bureaucracy!’ Having triumphantly ghosted London’s autobiography, Ackroyd’s obvious follow-up was the Thames: generator of life, origin of the city, a passage between ...”

“... it even when I was a part of it.16 March. One of the lowest moments this year was Tony Blair and Jack Straw misrepresenting the French and German position on Iraq in order to encourage xenophobia and get more support from the Murdoch papers.17 March. A bin Laden associate reported as being ‘quizzed’ by American agents in Pakistan. Were suspects ...”