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“... left after their time is over. Some account of the organic nature of tennis is missing from Caryl Phillips’s rather too random compilation, The Right Set: The Faber Book of Tennis, which I had looked forward to reading as an anthology that starts with Suzanne Lenglen and ends more or less with Venus Williams. The game’s tissue, if you will, is almost ...”

“... unable to bear the touch of his wife and children, he is permanently marooned among the savages. Tom Brodzinski, the protagonist or victim of Will Self’s satirical nightmare The Butt, meets a comparable fate. On holiday on an imaginary post-colonial island continent, Tom decides to give up smoking, and, distracted by the ...”

“... while closing in), Pym writes his life story, addressed in the form of a long letter to his son Tom. The main element in Pym’s confessions is not, it emerges, his seamy career in espionage, but the relationship with his own father Richard (‘Rick’), who has just died. In addition to his employer’s top secrets, Magnus has another box with him. This is ...”

“... friendless housewife in Nottingham, trying to get away from her husband; the second is about Tom, a bored, friendless Merchant Navy officer making his way to the flat of his dismal maiden aunt. In the third chapter, ‘Meeting’, Tom finds Pam in a dreary North Kensington flat, trying to gas herself with an unlit ...”

“... Thumbelina at the other. Imps, gnomes, the seven dwarfs in Snow White, ‘le petit Poucet’ or Tom Thumb, and the whole crew of Pucks and fairies are tiny. Such wee folk also tend to mischief and trickery and possess enviable survival skills. By contrast, gods, tyrants and ogres are gigantic and often violent, and tower into the celestial sphere. Here is ...”

“... Tony Parsons is the talented journalist who used to play Leonard Bast to Tom Paulin’s rentier intellectual on Late Review, the BBC’s weekly parade of Schlegelisms. He was the mean little man with the Estuary accent who was entitled to his views. He currently writes a column for the Mirror and his opinions spill forth also now in novels ...”

“... Canning and Lords Eldon, Liverpool and Sidmouth. There were fellow poets such as Felicia Hemans, Tom Moore, Samuel Rogers, Sir Walter Scott and Robert Southey; artists of various kinds including the gifted amateur Sir George Beaumont, Francis Chantry, John Constable, Thomas Lawrence, James Northcote and John Soane; and from the theatre, Jack ...”

“... Eighties. Saunders’s account of Partisan and its editor, the insufferably pretentious William Phillips – in a chapter she calls ‘Cultural Nato’ – is devastating. Far from being independent, PR was on the CIA payroll via front organisations like the Farfield Foundation. Before that, it had been carried financially by none other than Henry Luce (the ...”

“... what a life devoted to accuracy is a life devoted to. This, inevitably, is more the province of Tom Stoppard’s often riveting play about Housman, The Invention of Love, than of Burnett’s scholarly edition of the poems. While Wilde, whom Stoppard uses as a foil for Housman, warned against falling into careless habits of accuracy – as though accuracy ...”

“... In Horse Latitudes he writes a series of virtuoso haikus entitled ‘90 Instant Messages to Tom Moore’; the fifth one manages to be politically charged – ‘about’ the terrible reversals of Irish history – and also a brief formulation of Muldoon’s poetics: The Big House, you see, still stands, though now the tenants are the absentees. In The ...”

“... a week out of the national climb-down? Rider Haggard’s career has already attracted biographers. Tom Pocock, while never losing sight of the man as literary phenomenon, concentrates on his half-forgotten role as visionary of Empire. Here is the man who saw in the Zulus the makings of English gentlemen (which was more than could be said for the Boers); the ...”

“... this feuilleton in a hotel room, the Hyatt Regency in Houston, Texas: a Didionesque locale. (Caryl Phillips once told me that he liked to write his books in faraway hotel rooms. I admire that. It brings to mind Janet Flanner at the Ritz and James Schuyler at the Chelsea.) Joan Didion has often noted transiency’s allure, a writer’s necessary alienation from ...”

“... to be one of these. Meanwhile, Andrew continued to see Princess Anne until she took up with Mark Phillips, which finally prompted Andrew to propose to Camilla. They married in June 1973. The news distressed Charles, who was at sea. ‘I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,’ he wrote to Mountbatten, ruminating on what had happened to his ...”

“... In 1883, a Mr Wendell Phillips Garrison of New York published a travel narrative called What Mr Darwin Saw on his Voyage around the World, a narrative that follows pretty closely Darwin’s own line and Darwin’s own words, or at least the less intellectually taxing of Darwin’s own words. In a remarkable preface Garrison suggests that the text contains all a child needs at every stage of its education: a well-conducted parent could match the level of difficulty with the child’s evolving ability, telling the story in simple numbers for the babe in arms or on the knee, in greater detail for the toddler and schoolchild, until the grown student gets the undiluted works ...”

“... flipside, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. Helped along by the wired know-how of the studio owner Sam Phillips, Elvis and two rockabilly cats he’d only just met made a devilishly catchy new sound out of country dash and bluesy holler and after-hours leer. The name of the studio was Sun: flash, heat, escaping light. Ra worship in this other Memphis. Teenage ...”