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“... Professor Crick’s subject is important and his research has evidently been diligent. We now know a lot more about Orwell than we did, and the increment of knowledge is not always trivial. Why, then, is it impossible to commend this book with warmth? For two main reasons: first, in a work of such length the prevalence of carelessly written pages is a strong disincentive to continuing (and of course they are shown up all the more by their proximity to quotations from Orwell); and secondly, Orwell was a literary figure as well as a political thinker, and Crick’s literary touch is far from certain ...”

“... race. He sometimes came across as almost pathologically unsentimental. The Scottish driver Jim Clark, the only ‘real candidate for hero-worship’ he ever had, died in a crash in 1968, a week before Lauda’s first race. ‘What a shame,’ Lauda thought. ‘He’ll be missed.’ After Roger Williamson was burned to death at Zandvoort in 1973, while his ...”

“... be righted by my choice. But I have seen no evidence that the move to England amounted to exile. (Jon Stallworthy is writing the Life of MacNeice and may have evidence in hand.) After Sherborne, MacNeice went to Marlborough, well enough described in his unfinished and posthumously published autobiography, The strings are false (1965). One of MacNeice’s ...”

“... sense but, as it were, musical compositions to be interpreted, like all cultural forms, as such. Clark: the historians of the Annales School, having started out from a ‘structuralist’ rejection of the presuppositions of both cultural anthropology and narrative history, have come round after all to the study of both symbols and events. Shouldn’t all ...”

“... Jewish cowboy’, as he called himself). Ernest Haycox, T.T. Flynn, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, T.V. Olsen. (Pieces by these authors are included in Jon Tuska’s 1995 collection, The Western Story: A Chronological Treasury.) Good as the best works of these writers are, and despite the recent successes of ...”

“... the Christian name and added the surname ten years later. As a child she had fantasised that Clark Gable was her real father, and hung his picture alongside Abraham Lincoln’s on her wall. When she got to act with him, her perverse behaviour helped bring on his fatal heart attack: she herself speculated that this might have been her revenge on the ...”

“... documentaries. He got the chance to try a feature, Catch Us If You Can (1965), with the Dave Clark Five. It won an audience and attracted some American interest. So that’s how Boorman ended up in Soho one night discussing a bad script from a Donald Westlake novel, The Hunter, with Marvin, who was staying in London. ‘What do you think?’ Marvin ...”

“... of the main ways Britons have chewed over their postwar history. In 1988, the cultural historian Jon Savage, who had spent the 1970s as a young rock journalist writing doomy but excited pieces about punk and urban decay, published a cover feature about the decade for the style magazine the Face. It was headlined ‘The Decade that Taste Forgot’. The ...”

“... interviewer as well, with a varied roster of guests including the directors Walter Hill and Larry Clark, the actresses Anne Heche and Illeana Douglas, and the uncontainable Kanye West. His conversations with fellow novelists and screenwriters are among the best I’ve heard, insider sessions of literary shoptalk that discuss the mechanics of the trade instead ...”

“... office: Madison, Wisconsin), ‘the firm which outfitted Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable’ for their tours on the Dark Continent. The person I’d prefer to look like is Trevor Howard, the epitome of Mr Sensible, even with his kneecaps bared, but I’ve a feeling W&G can stretch to this. They’ll also be able to sort me out with a pair ...”

“... Freddie.) The MacNeice on display in these letters is much more sexually ambiguous than the one in Jon Stallworthy’s fond, donnish 1995 biography: ‘as many of his contemporaries were engaged in what he later called “mild homosexual romances”,’ Stallworthy wrote, ‘he singled out a “dark-haired boy of 16 who had large grey feminine eyes and asked ...”

“... of poetry was indeed a constant. One sign of his standing was the invitation to give the Clark Lectures at Cambridge, published in 1947 as The Poetic Image, one of his several attempts to lay down the law about the lawless nature of poetry. He and Lehmann tried their hand at founding a new literary journal, a fever that comes over so many writers at ...”

“... fact, only Sebastian Haffner and E.F. Schumacher were German; Isaac Deutscher, Arthur Koestler and Jon Kimche came respectively from Poland, Hungary and Switzerland. Several were Jews; another new recruit, the reporter Cyril Dunn, wrote that Astor had an ‘indestructible respect for the brilliance of the Jewish mind’. Their foreignness made a startling ...”

“... the imagination. Persons from Porlock was itself the product of elective interruption. As Jon Stallworthy points out, in the 1995 biography that we depend on for MacNeice’s later years, he was ‘making a fresh start at 54’ when he went half-time at the BBC. It was a bold but characteristic step. Auden said in his memorial address that, in ...”

“... the thinking that informed the Democracy Review undertaken by Corbyn’s political secretary, Katy Clark, a former MP; it also inspired the drive in 2018, heavily promoted by Momentum, to introduce ‘open selection’ for MPs, making it easier to challenge incumbents. (MPs on the party’s right were eager to paint this as bullying, but this level of ...”