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“... the picture as ‘la symphonie du blanc’. Vergo finds various other dead ends. In Cézanne’s Young Girl at the Piano: Overture to ‘Tannhäuser’ (1869-70), an old woman sits mending a stocking while a girl extends her skeletal fingers over the piano keys; but the sheet music is blank, and the association with Wagner is a pretentious appendage to an ...”

“... secrets of his own sexuality. All of these productions are considered at length in The Magic Box, Rob Young’s hefty survey of occult British film and television. Young, who wrote the excellent Electric Eden (2010), a history of the British folk-rock movement which was almost contemporaneous with these ...”

“... of propaganda) led by Anderson and Karel Reisz. Although he was becoming established as a young poet and his work was being published in the TLS and the New Statesman and broadcast by the Third Programme, Logue mostly wanted to be ‘part of the wave that had broken at the Royal Court’. Anderson suggested that Logue read ‘To My Fellow ...”

“... that he was inspired to start writing Simplicissimus by an etching he found in an inn as a young musketeer. He had gone into the inn hoping to find some fun with a local girl, but was struck by a picture on the wall of a ‘topsy-turvy world’; the image apparently prompted him to ‘see through the world’s follies’. He began reading in ...”

“... come?’ ‘Well, we can accommodate 25, at a pinch.’ But today there was only myself. The young guide, Rob, was waiting outside. A workman’s van hurtled past, then we crossed the road, went through a wicket gate and followed a path across the field. We were walking towards the tomb by an indirect route that ...”

“... Rob Fleming is 35 years old, nearly 36. He lives in North London, in a one-bedroom conversion flat in Crouch End. His girlfriend, Laura, is a lefty lawyer who would like to be working for a legal aid firm but finds herself, to her dismay, with a flash job in the City instead. Laura has this very morning walked out on Rob, with a carrier bag in one hand and a hold-all in the other ...”

“... and wiser, is possible. In A Spell of Winter, Catherine, the narrator, and her older brother Rob, grow up in the large crumbling country house with their grandfather, assorted housemaids and Miss Gallagher, a prissy governess whom neither can stand, but who suffers unrequited passion for young Cathy. The children ...”

“... lacked, and challenged stereotypes about environmental activists: that they are inevitably white, young, middle-class Europeans or Americans who can afford to hug trees. Saro-Wiwa’s campaign for environmental self-determination will prove critical to the development of a broader image of ecological activism. We have seen how the concerns of privileged white ...”

“... way those things look at one point on their way along the line.’ Even when they’re not that young, her characters sound like clever kids asking impossible questions: ‘Why – a completely primitive concept. Still, why does anybody anything, Rosie thinks.’ Eisenberg’s stories are classic in shape: they pinpoint the logic of the moment and arrange a ...”

“... forbids further reproduction of his shameful imaginings’). This time there’s a plot: the young (white) lesbian wife of a grand, gay (white) Southern poet runs off with her infant daughter and conceals herself from his inquiries by passing as a black lone parent. The racial caste system in rural Virginia being what it is, the blonde ...”

“... well about living authors if they annoy you than if you worship the very paper they write on. Rob Nixon is censorious and lively; Dale Salwak is reverent and laboured. His is the second book in recent memory expressly to demand recognition for Kingsley Amis as a moralist; the other, John McDermott’s, is actually called Kingsley Amis: An English ...”

“... their owners or settings, we shift from a gay bar to a movie set to a modest California home; a young man, Scott Thorson, played by Matt Damon, is taken to a Liberace show in Las Vegas, meets the great man backstage and is invited to lunch the next day. Thorson is star struck, dazzled by Liberace’s piano playing, especially when he doubles the tempo in ...”

“... in love. What matters is that in the fifteen years since he died she has managed to wean her ‘young soul’ from its yearning after his. Or not quite. The poem concludes with Rosina’s admission that she still harbours a taste for ‘memory’s rapturous pain’, even though she knows that any further indulgence in it would exclude her for ever from the ...”

“... had been to ingratiate themselves with travellers, strangle them suddenly with a scarf, then rob and bury them. By contrast, the English highwayman behaved, or tried to behave, like a gentleman, boldly confronting the victim at whose head he levelled a pistol, and refraining from shooting him unless he showed unreasonable resistance. This open method of ...”

“... might conjecture that mugging is a fashion – seen as a risky, exciting thing to do, while one is young – an established fashion, turning into a tradition. So, I turned to the eighth of the interviews with jaunty tough-guys, scattered through the book, for it is entitled ‘The Black Geezer’. This man claims to have served seven years for armed ...”