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“... Later he would write about how money leaked away, slippery as mercury: ‘Money in every pocket, no wallet, no clip/I just bunch it up and stuff it.’ Cash for Corso was always a dangerously occult commodity. ‘Money,’ he acknowledged, ‘doesn’t come with instructions.’ Corso of course is the other ‘drinky ...”

“... to the defence of a great and loyal Englishman of the old style. ‘I became Public Cultural Enemy No 1 over the Tennyson preface,’ Auden wrote to a friend, ‘a little comic seeing that T is one of my favourite poets.’ Auden’s peppery remark is now more than half a century old but it remains one of the best-known things said about Tennyson and keeps a ...”

“... one after another, without qualification or hierarchy. Parataxis, the late-explainers call it. No flimflam. Don’t wink at the camera until the camera winks back. Ben Watson, a contributor, like Perloff, to Removed for Further Study (a clutch of bright-eyed and slightly foxed Raworth exegetists, decent folk who are well aware that they are probably ...”

“... admired Gordon too, and then pledging himself to the cause of peace in the Middle East – it was no surprise that the boldest liar of all came out on top. Fortune favours the brave. In politics, it is tempting to think that a lie is a lie is a lie, and since everyone is at it, all that matters is what you can get away with. But that is to do Tony Blair a ...”

“... away the bodies so that an accurate count of the dead has never been possible and families had no remains to bury. Each year on 2 October a memorial service is held in the plaza in the Tlatelolco area of Mexico City where the massacre took place. This is where the students attacked in Iguala planned to go, and this was why they commandeered the ...”

“... were not intended for private viewing: although Hitler and Goebbels had their own television sets, no more than two hundred domestic receivers were ever sold. Instead, Berliners were provided with 11 public viewing rooms in which they could watch the broadcasts, as well as a special ‘telecinema’.By 1936, Berliners were enjoying a change of programme every ...”

“... cases in cinemas, 75 per cent of them male. Women presumably see more blood than men, and men no doubt saw even less of it before they were allowed to be present at births. The late Romanian dictator Ceausescu decreed one of Dracula’s prototypes, Vlad the Impaler, a national hero, while 27 per cent of respondents to an American survey confessed to ...”

“... trope.Then several things happened. The owner of Books and Bookmen, an operator by the name of John Dosse, took the opportunity of emulating the Masada faction and the Goebbelses, and committed suicide himself. I received a moist letter from the editor of the magazine, written in the tone of ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’ I was accused in print, by ...”

“... lived a far more public life than most Oxford dons do. So successful was he in this respect that, no doubt to his own pleasure, he was probably not often popularly thought of as an Oxford don. The media have their own not very likeable stereotype of the Oxford don, and Alan clearly didn’t fit that (though, to be fair, Oxford is full of people who do). So he ...”

“... work tearing off the adhesive strips or bringing the numbers to light with the aid of a coin edge. No such task presented itself. Instead a 4000-word letter from Mr John MacArthur introduced me to the world of plate-collecting. Eight million platers can’t be wrong and 450,000 joined the ranks in 1983 alone. Many of them ...”

“... bureaucratically-controlled London Transport to the new, elected Greater London Council. There was no complaint from the Conservative Party. Its two transport frontbenchers in the Commons, up-and-coming young hopefuls called Margaret Thatcher and Michael Heseltine, welcomed the transfer, and specifically stated that this would enable the Council, if it felt ...”

“... in a protected zone in the midst of the sea which covers the land. But once he thinks ‘there are no such things as unicorns’, the water bursts through. By the end of the poem, he has returned to his usual way of life, and the status of his experience of the Flood is indeterminate: was it vision or delusion? The poem’s echoes of the Bible and of medieval ...”

“... book too. It has been widely labelled as a semi-autobiographical novel, though in fact there is no such thing. And one reviewer comments approvingly that Esther Freud writes about what she knows; well, let us hope we all do that. Over these disadvantages Hideous Kinky quickly triumphed. It is an impressive performance and not only as a first novel. As a ...”

“... had one child, a daughter. So he’s a curious – you could almost say implausible – mix of John McCain and Bill Clinton, though a few decades younger than either of them. According to the conventions of stories about fictional presidents, the novel strives to maintain the appearance of bipartisanship; Duncan never tells us which party he belongs ...”

“... her first and second novels, she was asked if she knew the difference between right and wrong. ‘No. Nothing is ever black or white to me, at all.’ After which Dunn asks: ‘But do you have any kind of definite moral code? Like for instance you shouldn’t sleep with married men?’ ‘Not at all, no,’ Quin ...”