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“... fiction. Alan Bennett’s ‘The Laying on of Hands’ opens in a High Anglican church, St Andrew Upchance near Shoreditch, for the star-studded funeral of Clive Dunlop, ‘quite young – 34 according to the dates given on the front of the Order of Service’, but ‘these days there was not much mystery about that.’ When I returned the folder ...”

“... When​ I was young it was possible to feel you’d made it as a writer simply by getting a phone call from one of four editors. When it came to ambition, very few of the writers I knew really gave a fuck about being in Who’s Who, being named an honorary fellow or having one of the queen’s gongs, or a million quid advance. What they wanted was for the phone to ring and for Bob Silvers to be on the line ...”

“... common decency. British politicians don’t talk that way any more, even when it matters. Take Andrew Lansley, the secretary of state for health and once the principal private secretary to Norman Tebbit. Like so many of his cabinet colleagues, and so many of those student politicians in the shadow cabinet, he appears to grasp the bullet points of an ...”

“... Samuel Pepys​ was not an easygoing commuter. In the struggle to get from Seething Lane to Whitehall, he exhibited something close to the mindset of the average London cyclist, deploying the word ‘cunt’ while slowly inflating with murderous feeling. Being Pepys, he sought to cope with the worst of the ‘traffic’, axle to axle on Ludgate Hill, by sending for a barrel of oysters or getting out of his coach to investigate the cake situation ...”

“... Among people who care to be remembered, there can’t be many who would settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji ...”

“... he uses, as here, in his short poem (a free version of the Latin poem by Arthur Johnston) about St Andrew’s, where he has lived with his family and worked for more than twenty years: I love how it comes right out of the blue North Sea edge, sunstruck with oystercatchers. A bullseye centred at the outer reaches, A haar of kirks, one inch in front of ...”

“... I’ve been thinking all week about Jon Venables. In some way, I find it too distressing to write down what the case means to me, when so many people believe the young man is simply a lost cause, a person in the grip of evil. The papers have been ringing asking for comment: the messages go to voicemail. Outside, buses pass in quick succession, the passengers reading their newspapers and seeming very sure of something: ‘Once Evil, Always Evil,’ says the Mirror ...”

“... Shirley MacLaine danced the can-can for Khrushchev and later said: ‘life is a cosmic joke.’ By the time he got to Hollywood, the Soviet premier had become an international comic hero; to many an ogre of the left, but also a character out of Dr Strangelove or one of Vonnegut’s novels. K Blows Top, a non-fiction account of Khrushchev’s trip to America in 1959, could be the most entertaining book of the year, but it is also, in its blood, a novel, a novel-in-secret, with index and pictures and History as a character ...”

“... Once a rich person​ gets past a billion, their sense of humour tends to go, along with their tolerance for ordinary people. They can’t begin to spend the money, but they can’t stop thinking about it either. The clever ones don’t buy into the fallacy that the riches are actually theirs: they offload as much as they can, then leave the problem firmly where it belongs, in the hands of their children ...”

“... Beckham, aged six, going as Cinderella to a birthday party at Buckingham Palace arranged by Prince Andrew’s former wife, ‘wearing £240 Gucci boots, a £695 monogrammed cashmere Burberry coat, a £1525 Versace gown and holding a £1200 Goyard leather mini-bag’. For a different approach to success, consider Taylor Swift’s actions during her current tour ...”

“... Steptoe and Son had started on TV.The Samsons lived on the top floor at 115 Rottenrow. The father, Andrew, known to everybody as Sam, was 42, an ex-serviceman. His wife, Jean, was 40. She had been Jane Culross Third in 1942, when they got married at St Mungo’s R.C. Church. They were just round the corner from Sam’s parents, who lived in a tenement on ...”

“... inner, truer self – working for charities after she offered a tabloid reporter access to Prince Andrew for $500,000.Titian-haired Sarah is never far away from Lady Margaret. They are fellow sufferers, bold women who resist the roles thrust on them, and there is no end of vanity in the book’s romanticism, a wish to settle scores, to provide a high-minded ...”

“... about reversing the method used for the picking of teams. I remember the day and the very hour. ‘O’Hagan,’ the PE assistant said, ‘pick your team.’ I walked the few yards onto the field like General Patton contemplating the sweep of his 3rd Army over France. ‘Scobie,’ I said, ‘McDonald.’ And so it went on until every lousy player in the group ...”

“... eventually brought James into nodding and tobacco-loaning relations with my grandfather, Michael O’Hagan, who came from Glasgow’s Calton district. They say James was shy, though, and when people would ask him how come he had two second-names he’d just blush, and mutter something about being quite lucky. Michael protected him, after his own style. My ...”

“... When I made my First Communion, a famously bitter Catholic aunt of mine took me into a side-chapel of our church. She wrapped me up in her arms, right in the middle of all her perfumery, straightened my red sash, and told me I was ‘blessed, blessed, blessed’. Then out of her bag she handed me a wooden crucifix with a luminous lime-green Christ glued onto it ...”