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“... a negligible aspect of English taste in the Twenties and Thirties. Along with the photographs of Cecil Beaton, and the stage designs of Beaton and Messel, it set a style which influenced advertising, films and interior decoration. It vulgarised the past, prettified it into palatability, rather as Beaton’s photographs and Norman Hartnell’s frocks produced ...”

“... When had they first noticed Clinton’s talent for being all things to all men? Even as Cecil Rhodes’s legatees were taking the liner across to Southampton in October 1968, and viewing their own destiny with a high seriousness and purity, they found themselves sharing a ship with Bobby Baker. Mr Baker, who was Lyndon Johnson’s bag-man and fixer ...”

“... the same sort of thing, though he would be more likely to call it infrastructure. It is said that Cecil Parkinson, asked what had happened to the fabled revenues of North Sea Oil, replied with perfect insouciance that they had been spent on the financing of unemployment benefit. This could well be the encapsulating anecdote of the Thatcher decade: at once an ...”

“... bikers and mustachioed, short-haired clones. At Oxford in the 1920s, gay aesthetes like Cecil Beaton displayed themselves in ‘fur gauntlet gloves, a cloth-of-gold tie, a scarlet jersey and Oxford bags’. In Brighton in the 1950s, queens wore ‘flared trousers, Hawaiian shirts, flamboyant hairdos, kerchiefs around their ...”

“... but on behalf of some imagined community of actors. As he seeks to express it first in a letter to Cecil Beaton, then in one to Edith Evans, the matter provides a near operatic occasion on which to delineate – in exasperated parenthetical gasps, like sobs – the very meaning of kinship: It’s so hard to say what I feel – to have let down the whole side ...”

“... in the mayfly career of Pauline Boty since her death in 1966 at the age of 28. In accordance with Cecil Beaton’s dictum that it takes slightly longer than 25 years for a cycle of taste to complete and for the merely dated to become historic, it was in 1993 that the Barbican put on The Sixties Art Scene in London, which featured several of her paintings. Its ...”

“... someone else back and that’s what neither of them was good at.28 March. Another death, this time David Storey whom I liked and found sympathetic, though I might run into him only occasionally and most often in M&S. It was always cheering, even if these days he was often shuffling as much from the medicines he was taking as from old age. But he would call me ...”

“... as the trial approached, his attitude changed perceptibly. Writing to his friend the journalist David Ayerst, Tippett declared himself ‘very much at peace and ready to go’.On 21 August 1943, at 7.30 a.m. precisely, after serving two months of his three-month sentence, Tippett was released from Wormwood Scrubs. He was met by Britten and Pears, who would ...”

“... the aura of a religious relic. (For years it was the only pre-1930 Hollywood movie – save Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings – regularly shown on American commercial television.) As such, it opens on a mournful note. To the accompaniment of a plaintive pseudo-semitic melody, a series of intertitles identifies the Jews as ‘a race older than ...”

“... and then sent down in pieces’. It was an understandable, perhaps an inevitable reaction. As Cecil Beaton once pointed out, taste takes on average 25 years to complete a cycle and bring the fashions of the previous generation back if not into vogue then at least into critical focus. But in the case of Brown that did not happen, the reaction darkened into ...”

“... abused nor being ignored dented the incurable boastfulness of newspapers and their proprietors. Cecil King, Northcliffe’s nephew and then director of the Daily Mirror, claimed that it was the Mirror which had provided the real opposition during the war. ‘The result was the Labour landslide in 1945 to which Messrs Attlee, Bevin and Co had contributed ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... farmers who sold up and took what capital they could with them. ‘From the famine onwards,’ David Fitzpatrick writes, ‘male and female emigrants were quite evenly balanced. Boys and girls alike swarmed out of every parish, every social stratum, and almost every household, systematically thinning out the fabric of Irish society.’About a million ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”