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“... the vogue-word: but this seems to me a farrago of fantasy-triggers. I was astonished when Marina Warner asserted on television that the book ‘gives you an astonishing understanding of a political situation’. On the same day, Marilyn Butler was equally effusive on Radio 3 and Hermione Lee assured us in the Observer that the author has ‘impeccably heroic ...”

“... the first witness. He repeated his charge that the movies had been captured by foreigners. Harry Warner (the most actively anti-Nazi studio boss) and Twentieth Century Fox’s Darryl Zanuck testified on their own behalf, the latter stressing his Christian background and Nebraska roots. The studios also enlisted as their spokesman Wendell Willkie, Republican ...”

“... For Stax, Redding’s death was a staggering loss. While the studio was still in mourning, Warner Brothers bought Atlantic Records, the New York label that Stax had long-standing agreements with. When Jim Stewart went over the paperwork, he found that Atlantic, and now Warner Brothers, owned all of his master ...”

“... sequence of letters between a farmhand, Emily Chitticks, and her sweetheart, Private Will Martin; five of the 23 letters she wrote were returned, inscribed KILLED. In one, she told him: ‘I have dreamt that you were back home with me dear and the most strange thing about them, you are always in civilian clothes when I dream of you & and I have never ...”

“... prototypes aside, he essentially belongs in the tradition of the American cop, his true home a Warner Brothers movie. He’s not expected to answer awkward existential questions: but he has something, an integrity of his own, that only a hero empty of everything else seems to possess. The empty heroes of Hemingway and the earlier American crime novelists ...”

“... context and mood of the time – Wodehouse agreeably exploiting British pastoral illusions, Rex Warner, in his parable The Aerodrome, warning us against a parochialism that could be dangerous in a hostile and regimented world, and so on. And now the business of making everything hang together, not only in the arts but in the political present and its drab ...”

“... lips regain colour as her blood is piped directly from her veins into his. Sylvia Townsend Warner visits the public letter-writers’ booths, ‘where men and women whose faces bear the unmistakable imprint of intellect and thought wait in a queue to dictate the letters they are not able to write for themselves’. Ralph Bates notes the care and ...”

“... and Nintendo video games, Airfix models, Tintin and Asterix, David Attenborough’s Life on Earth, Warner Brothers cartoons, The Waltons and The A-Team, the film Zombie Flesh-Eaters. The novel begins in Bangkok’s backpackers’ quarter, the Khao San Road, ‘a decompression chamber for those about to leave or enter Thailand, a halfway house between East and ...”

“... innocent homoeroticism discussed by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory (1975) or in Martin Taylor’s less fashionable, less thesis-driven anthology, Lads, republished in 1998. In Taylor’s collection, so often are the poems bad, unaware (Ronald-like?) or puny that the best among them – Gurney’s, Edward Thomas’s, Owen’s – rise from ...”

“... an actual dispute about contemporary art was staged at the Tate – defending, Michael Craig-Martin, leading light at Goldsmiths’ College; prosecuting, Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion (it’s telling that there was no obvious British champion on this side). It was made a condition that the speakers should not address each other. Afterwards I ...”

“... Gay, the B-29 from which the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima 50 years earlier. The director, Martin Harwit, wanted an exhibition that would place the bombing of Hiroshima in context, showing what it did and giving arguments for and against. There was a great storm of protest from veterans, who felt they were being depicted as ‘war criminals’. After a ...”

“... books?’ That reply always ends a conversation. On the way into the hall on the last night I saw Martin Amis, on assignment for Newsweek, being scanned with a metal detector. I collected my floor pass and headed for stage right, by the West Virginia delegation, who were wearing ‘War on Coal’ pins and mining helmets to remind the nation which state lights ...”

“... exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, and Tynemarch did not return my call. But here is what Martin Kane, Severn Trent’s director of customer relations, said in an interview with Radio Gloucestershire shortly after the floods: ‘The risk of flood defences being breached at the Mythe was – I think it was something like a one in a thousand chance of ...”