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“... European ladies’ and similar barracuda. He doesn’t divulge any gossip or glean any Tom Wolfe-ish observations from these outings, too concerned with keeping tabs on his own progress to tilt the spotlight elsewhere. One of the best-known passages in Making It is its account of the status update running like a stock ticker through the minds of ...”

“... 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it. ‘It was going to be a bad day,’ Darling says with dry understatement. Brown adopts a different approach. His ...”

“... corpus of anecdotes to work with, untrustworthy tales retrieved and rehearsed by Gilchrist, Mona Wilson and the rest. The interpretations – efforts to understand their own incomprehension – attempted by other poets: Rossetti, Yeats, Swinburne, Ruthven Todd, Kathleen Raine. The inducting of Blake into a spiritual brotherhood. The bones of the life ...”

“... she was in sympathy with Mr Heath on everything except the Common Market, ‘I do think that Mr Wilson, personally, may have seen better in regard to Europe being on the opposition bench with less salary and being older, smaller and under less strain.’ She was vehemently opposed to the Common Market, the ‘common’ always underlined when she wrote about ...”

“... protected the writers and actors from the BBC hierarchy. John Bird used to do a very good Harold Wilson and after one show Ned was summoned by Hugh Carleton-Greene, the director-general, and told that the prime minister was threatening legal action. ‘Tell him to go ahead,’ said Ned. ‘Say that just because he’s prime minister he shouldn’t feel he ...”

“... This at least elicits something, including the interesting fact that very often leading actors (Tom Cruise is mentioned and, down the scale a bit, Jimmy Nail) require that the extras do not look at them while they are performing as they find it off-putting.One of the extras asks me what I am reading. I show him my book, some Alice Munro short ...”

“... it as racist. Edward Said, for instance, spoke of ‘an orgy of racist fantasy and sexual peeping tom-ism’. ‘It was as if every threadbare Orientalist cliché about “fabled” Oriental wealth and sexual prowess was marshalled to conquer (read “violate”) the blonde English snow fairy,’ he wrote in al-Ahram Weekly. And in impressive support of his ...”

“... Canaveral to see it safely on its way aboard an American missile. This was the time described by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, when the strip of motels and hamburger joints along Cocoa Beach became a playground for astronauts who loved ‘Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving and Driving & the rest’. ‘At night the pool areas of the motels became like ...”

“... too is a struggle to break free of ‘typecasting’ – a refusal to accept the allotted Uncle Tom role. This is why a young black woman identified with Marilyn Monroe. James Baldwin identified with her too, as he told Weatherby when he was introduced to him by Tennessee Williams. Not that Weatherby was the only writer on Monroe to spot these moments of ...”