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“... as if hi-tech limbs had been grafted onto the torso of early modern statecraft: Wolf Hall meets William Gibson. Komiaga begins his day by repressing a nobleman, and then spends the rest of it attending to a variety of tasks: censoring a play, investigating a subversive poem, resolving a customs dispute with the Chinese in Siberia, visiting a ...”

“... in the OED, and so offers the hope that I might have made it up – though, alas, I discover that William Gibson, father of cyberpunk, used it to describe an addiction to technology. Ah well, my usage is etymologically purer because it preserves the sense of the Greek root -laliá, meaning ‘chatter’. Shakespeare was a playwright, a word forged with ...”

“... specific to the latecomer. And it’s not clear that the implacable deafness is pathological. William Gibson said the future is already with us, it’s just not very evenly distributed: someone who indefatigably comes to your house when you have crawled away in exhaustion is a social monstrosity but also, quite possibly, simply caught in a wrinkle in ...”

“... the paintings: one problem for the biographer is that Dalí said it all, quite wittily, himself. Gibson does the exhaustive job of slotting every fact into place for the first time, dispelling a few confusions and taking us up to the last days, with the wrangles between Spain and Catalunya over the legacy of what was by then a ghastly, petrified human ...”

“... older and tried hands: proven winners. As a cohort, novelists are MacArthur’s senior citizens. William Gaddis (1982) was awarded a fellowship at the age of 60, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (1984) at 57, Susan Sontag (1990) at 59, Ernest J. Gaines (1993) at 60. Thomas Pynchon was a relatively young 51 when he won, but by 1988 already the author of his major ...”

“... too, was transformed: the married woman whose earnings were pocketed by her husband, the Rev. William Gaskell, gave way to a canny, adaptable negotiator, keen to make money for the holidays she needed to restore her health after frenetic periods of writing, family life and social activity. The stories and novellas proved to be gold mines for biographical ...”

“... found success outside it: J.G. Ballard as an author of realist novels, Samuel Delany in academia, William Gibson, Lethem himself (whose first books owed a lot to Dick). The sciences – biomedical sciences, climatology, ecology, information technology – seem omnipresent now. It should surprise no one that at least one writer who spent most of his life ...”

“... around now that’s any good, either, which is to overlook not only the work of such writers as William Gibson and Jonathan Lethem, but also Ronald Moore’s remake of Battlestar Galactica, a TV series that’s as intelligent, nuanced and unflinching an examination of the United States’ post-9/11 militarism, foreign policy and relation to the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... David Gibson was a man stiff and parsonical; by all accounts the sort of man who got things done. You could say he was obsessed with ridding Glasgow of its slums, with turning them into something bright and high and unquestionably modern. That’s what he wanted, and he’d already made vast advances towards getting it when he became convener of Glasgow Corporation’s housing committee in 1964 ...”

“... other sources of company revenue: taxes on gambling, sex work and cock-fighting. His deputy, William Farquhar (Justin Trudeau’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather), resented Raffles’s evangelism, and in post-Raffles Singapore (he returned to England in 1823), traditional company practices resumed. The free port’s success was immense. In the ...”

“... of Aughrim, about John Leo’s debts, and his run-ins with the owner of the local newspaper, William Hastings. All this and more can be discerned from census returns, court records and newspaper archives. And I imagined things that I couldn’t actually prove. I wondered if, when he was in Dublin (to get married, for example, or to help transport the ...”

“... tactile authority, few rivals outside the work of DeLillo, Pynchon and (more to his own taste) William Gibson. And, as in their novels, local observation in Jameson was complemented by an implacable awareness of what he called the ‘unrepresentable exterior’ enclosing all the slick and streaming phenomena in view. In the ...”

“... either by silence, rehab, cameo appearances, adverts, jail or, if they’re lucky, B-movies. William Friedkin made The French Connection and The Exorcist and was nominated for several Oscars before climbing to the top of his personal godhead and leaping off. Last year he directed Episode 9 in the eighth season of the TV show CSI: Crime Scene ...”

“... School; and that Sir Thomas Watson was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock became Dean of St Paul’s near the close of the 17th century; there was a Portsmouth cricketer named Sherlock; of a certain Patrick Sherlock, another contemporary of Conan ...”