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“... the War against the Hizbullah’. I decided to stick to my job and went straight to the conference hall, leaving the tempting croissants behind. I found myself a good seat, close to the stage but not too close, and felt ready to hear how threatening Ahmadinejad’s shadow was. More and more people crowded in and eventually filled every corner of the ...”

“... conspirators Bob Haldeman and John Ehrlichman were his arch-enemies on the paper). By then, he’d already been part of the Allied occupation of Germany pulling bodies out of the rubble, gone AWOL to attend the Nuremberg Trials (with the intention of assassinating Hermann Göring) and worked as a gun-toting union organiser for Detroit car workers. In other ...”

“... the dame or seigneur has held Sark as a Crown fief since Elizabeth I granted the island to Helier de Carteret in 1565, on condition that he defend it against her enemies. He divided the land into forty tenements, each with property rights in perpetuity and reciprocal duties of defence and tithe. (Until 2021, tenements could not be split up, but tenants are ...”

“... not enough to confirm the greatness of greatness; we want to know our business with the dead. David Marr unfolds it, steadily, over seven hundred pages. The first vindication of his huge and wonderful book is that it offers ways into all of White’s work, uncovering materials which were taken up and transformed in the making of the novels, the stories ...”

“... It is hard to believe that we do not live in ‘new times’. For a generation raised after 1945 on what purported to be Keynesian certainties, and in an international system dominated all too obviously by the two major victors, the transformations of the last twenty years are difficult to assimilate. The speed of these transformations has now accelerated crazily: anything one writes about Eastern Europe, for example, is likely to be half-an-hour and, therefore, hopelessly out of date ...”

“... humane, cosmopolitan and inspiring, and behind it lay the struggle of a very rich man to do good. In his role as owner-editor, David Astor had more freedom than any other journalist in London, but power made him bashful and uneasy. When, towards the end of Astor’s editing career, the South African journalist ...”

“... a wound. The poem is more openly dismissive of his one-time employer:           I’d always thought him an ass which he pronounced arse. ‘Class’ is, with the exception of one sentence, written in the first person. Referring to Lubbock’s title, with its tricky second word, Tomlinson neatly introduces the sense of ‘class’ meaning ...”

“... Say ‘David Storey’ and readers of my (and his) generation will recall the final shot of This Sporting Life: Frank Machin (Richard Harris), mired, spavined, raising himself on the rugby field to lurch back into hopeless battle. His life as a professional is over. Football chews up its workforce faster even than the pits ...”

“... commonplace had found a champion who could wear its colours with all the ceremony of greatness.’ David Skal’s new biography of Stoker follows his 2004 study, Hollywood Gothic, which managed to take Dracula on page, stage and screen seriously, but not too seriously. It becomes clear reading the Cambridge Companion to ‘Dracula’ how difficult it is to ...”

“... A drunken American historian once lurched over to David Caute at a party and told him: ‘Having read your last novel, or part of it, I’d advise you to give up writing fiction – if you weren’t such a lousy historian.’ Caute, a connoisseur of masochism, tells the story against himself (in Contemporary Novelists, 1976 ...”

“... to baffle the predictors, though a massed formation of bombers was most unlikely to do so. For most of the war, we who served behind barbed wire in public parks and on lonely headlands, surrounded by jolly ATS girls, were well aware that the public thought very little of our marksmanship. Since every shoot depended on dozens of people doing the ...”

“... Sebastopol, with its wash of grey sky over a stack of black landscape, is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich, the town at its centre tiny, visible only in matchstick detail. Elsewhere Crimea, under the unforgiving sun, is rendered lunar, or Martian – pitted, rubbly, leached of shade, the scrub on the cliffs like spotted mould. Fenton made an ...”

“... North Hill by my grandmother. Her modus operandi was simple. A regular and trusted customer, she’d take the latest romance to the counter to be stamped (later she’d inscribe her mark on the back endpaper – she didn’t want unwittingly to take the same one out again, thus wasting her fee). In her shopping basket her ...”

“... can be tolerated, and might even be enjoyed, as piano-players in the funhouse of letters. Early in David Plante’s diaries, we find him tinkling away, dropping names in basso profundo, as if knowing people and knowing what they do in private can be the thing that makes one special. He is 28 years old when he comes to London ...”

“... sugar and slaves – from whom is descended one of the National Theatre’s noted actors, David Harewood. When I first showed People to the director Nicholas Hytner he remarked that it wasn’t like anything else I’d done – or anything else I’d done with him. The ...”