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“... they deal with public affairs, there must be much in them which is no longer readily understood. John MichaelGibson and Richard Lancelyn Green have prudently decided against annotation, preferring to provide 13 notes on selected topics. They provide, also, a ‘Categorical Index’, excellent alike in conception and ...”

“... In the opening chapter of A Study in Scarlet Dr Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes. Holmes says, ‘How are you?’ and adds: ‘You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.’ Watson asks in astonishment: ‘How on earth did you know that?’ and Holmes, ‘chuckling to himself’, answers: ‘Never mind.’ In the following chapter the two men observe through a window ‘a stalwart, plainly dressed individual’ walking down the street with a letter in his hand ...”

“... to do. Irene was the second of the five Langhorne sisters of Richmond, Virginia. She married Dana Gibson, the inventor of the Gibson girl. Famous for her beauty from coast to coast, she never got divorced and never gave any trouble, so she doesn’t come into James Fox’s story much; and neither does the eldest Langhorne ...”

“... of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange County. He used to straddle the entrance to the John Wayne International Airport; now, so as not to suffer the weatherbeaten fate of the original, the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County ...”

“... status, briefly elevated as the great modern poet that independent witnesses like Yvor Winters and John Crowe Ransom had always considered him, and in many quarters is now being just as promptly and precipitately returned to the Victorian cobwebs. What has done most damage – and understandably, since it’s the verdict of a friend over many years, with no ...”

“... of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety ...”

“... Horace and Ovid threw down the gauntlet to oblivion: come and get me if you can. Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts are poets and professors of poetry, and the authors of a previous collaboration, Edgelands, which took as its subject the dejected spaces that buffer suburban developments, industrial parks, highways and airports. They have now teamed up ...”

“... have kept all right so far this winter, but won’t brag.’ Three days later, in a note thanking John Middleton Murry for a presentation copy of one of his books, comes a sudden flash of intimacy almost painful in its nakedness: ‘I feel a sad sense of shortcoming at your good opinion of my writings & myself. I fear you do not know what a feeble person I ...”

“... that Bush’s delivery is really an impersonation of Ronald Reagan impersonating James Stewart and John Wayne, but I think that elevates him too much: his mentality is clouded with lesser subtleties, occluded with hungers of a more brutal, mercenary, low-budget kind. He has the effective salesman’s knowledge of how to play with people’s sense of what is ...”

“... themselves, and all these variables may be controlled for effect. There can be art in this, and Michael Fried argues that within Western painting there is a special tradition of realism, stemming at least from Caravaggio (who, he reminds us, painted a Medusa). In such pictures it is not that a shocking effect is due to reality being let in through pictorial ...”

“... Powers is an ambitious novelist. A thing that clearly irks him is to be asked what he thinks of Michael Crichton. The ‘Cavern’ descriptions in Plowing the Dark are eerily paralleled (in a coarse way) by the VR ‘Chamber’ in Disclosure. In places, The Gold Bug Variations reads like an upmarket Jurassic Park. Is Powers, with his digital ...”

“... five weeks after the ship went down. It starred a real-life survivor – the 22-year-old Dorothy Gibson, already famous as a model when she became Brulatour’s mistress (both were married). Rushing across the ocean to be in Brulatour’s arms, she had found a place in a half-empty lifeboat that failed to go back and rescue would-be survivors flailing in the ...”

“... intimate world of the international Latinate élite of humanist Europe. The scholarly career of Michael Screech is of itself commentary on that momentous intellectual revolution, since it was Screech’s devotion to the achievement of Rabelais that led him into the world of Erasmus, from whom Rabelais, like Cervantes, took his inspiration. The most recent ...”

“... outside, the world that forms the books.Writing about Christie in the LRB (20 December 2018), John Lanchester argued that part of the reason she’s still vastly more read than her contemporaries is that she was less invested in her subjects, and therefore less likely to break ‘the containment field of the detective genre’ by making ideological points ...”

“... confronts the beholder far more boldly. Charles Hope, in his remarkable monograph on Titian, like Michael Jacobs in a brisk and entertaining polemic on the nude in painting, rejects the idea that this is a painting of Venus.1 It represents simply ‘a mortal female lying on a bed’, as Hope puts it, ‘gazing at us with a startlingly direct and unambiguous ...”