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“... mid-Sixties we began to make a swap in the evening and thus became acquainted with the writing of John Healy in the Backbencher column of that newspaper. He wrote every week about a new breed of Fianna Fail politician. He wrote with wit and irreverence, but he wrote from the inside and he conferred a huge glamour on the young ministers in Lemass’s ...”

“... to lead their own lives. When, later, he was one of the five ministers selected to check whether John Profumo was lying about his relationship with Christine Keeler, Macleod distinguished himself by avoiding his colleagues’ ponderous circumlocutions. ‘Look, Jack,’ he said, ‘the basic question is: “Did you fuck her?” ’ Sadly, Profumo continued ...”

“... India and China but also to smaller nations such as the Philippines and Israel, and has become a major factor of international commerce and private finance. The fiefdoms of the ‘nuclear barons’ extend from the uranium mines of Western Australia to missile warheads targeted across the North Pole. They influence, and are influenced by, the price of sugar ...”

“... and somewhat to their own surprise, it is thought, obtained – a commitment from both the major parties to introduce legislation for a referendum. The subject-matter of this referendum was to be a clause which, if inserted in the Constitution, would not only reinforce the present very stringent legislation on abortion but would make it impossible for ...”

“... damage to the reputation of the UN in the run-up to war, because of the brazen way in which the major powers used the Security Council as a place in which to play the game of high politics. But both conflicts succeeded in enhancing the reputation of the UN once formal hostilities were over, as it became clear that the ...”

“... midcult territory that he does, somewhere between literary respectability and bestsellerdom: John O’Hara, Nelson Algren, James Jones, John Hersey. Parini declares in a fighting Afterword that answers to the Steinbeck question ‘spring to mind’. Clearly the answer which springs highest and most persistently is ...”

“... number of the 47 novels to print. A new and complete edition of the letters (edited by N. John Hall) is about to take over from Bradford Booth’s handy but imperfect single volume. A new and definitive biography (by Hall again) is in hand. And there has been an astonishing number of monographs and hardbacked collections of essays on Trollope in the ...”

“... being barristers was almost unthinkable: at the contemporary Bar sexism and racism are still major obstacles for those who do not form part of the Bar’s core constituency of white middle-class males. Dominic makes great play of a technique of his father’s which is common to all criminal barristers, who vary their accent depending on who they are ...”

“... John Bayley’s new novel is largely about those who are had on, or taken in, and this may well include his readers, who need to keep their wits about them. To begin with, he conjures up a couple of innocents. There was an innocent, too, as hero in his last novel, In Another Country, published in 1955. But Oliver, a young officer with the British army of occupation, was a worrier and a sensitive, risking trouble for the sake of his German girlfriend, and contrasted with his hideously successful rival ...”

“... Parmigianino on a half-globe of wood is the first impression which many people take away from John Ashbery’s poetry. The poem in which it appears, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, a meditation on Parmigianino’s strange Mannerist painting, suddenly made Ashbery’s name much less obscure than his work. The collection to which it lent its name ...”

“... are merely low and intrusive. In his Irving to Irving (1974), Charles Madison credits them with a major part of the responsibility for the present fallen state of the American publishing industry. (Madison’s book traces a completed cycle from Washington Irving, who helped his publisher with money in an emergency, to Clifford Irving, who embezzled his ...”

“... the Alamein dinner, to which I looked forward with keener and keener anticipation. Indeed, like John Osborne waiting for Max Miller to come on stage in whatever provincial repertory theatre it was that he had sought him out, I found that I began to laugh before the Field-Marshal rose to speak and that while he was speaking I was reduced to tears by the ...”

“... at Agirad and Asmara, but Italy’s First African War – a term that in Italian still denotes a major disaster of any kind – was marked from start to finish by avoidable and ultimately tragic mistakes. The Orthodox Christian empire of Ethiopia faced many threats during its long history, but the Italians couldn’t be considered the most serious of ...”

“... Document Supply’. In seven years’ time, this document suggests, there will have been a major shift to providing off-site service in two forms: Xerox or photo-reproduced material (from Boston Spa, mainly) and digitised images transmitted via a users’ electronic network. By 2000, it is promised, ‘we expect to deliver six million items annually to ...”

“... In the London Review of Books, John Maynard Smith said about scientists: ‘however interested they may be in politics or history or philosophy, their first love is science itself.’ If only I could follow this bent, and tell something of Hamilton as a mathematician. As it happens, he also wrote a good deal of poetry, but his poems lack the magic of his equations, which seem more beautiful and moving now than when they were imagined 150 years ago ...”