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“... On 31 August 1939 Alan Cameron was at his desk at the BBC, where he was secretary to the Central Council of School Broadcasting, when he heard that the British fleet was mobilising. This meant that war with Germany was imminent and Cameron telephoned home to give his wife, the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, the news. She received it without apparent emotion and with an awkwardness of tone that made an impression on the Irish writer and occasional IRA gunman Sean O’Faolain, with whom she was in bed at the time ...”

“... lime had mysteriously declined after the Bronze Age. Vera believes that oaks reproduced within light thorny thickets where animals could not get at them. Once they had grown up and overtopped the thorn they created an oak grove. They did not reproduce beneath themselves, but grew up in new thickets in the savannah, to which their acorns had been carried by ...”

“... car crash’. To judge by his title, Hall’s starting point seems to have been the scene from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s 1986 graphic novel The Watchmen in which Rorschach, an alienated outlaw convinced that the world has no meaning other than that which we impose on it (which is why he is named after the ink-blot test), is betrayed to the police. As ...”

“... 22 when the war began.) Pityingly, the narrator observes Jak’s snub-nosed profile in the half-light: ‘I could tell from his narrow cheeks that he was still young; his steel helmet looked almost like the shell of a tortoise. These boys had a special something about their cheeks that recalled playing soldiers on a suburban common. “My Redskin ...”

“... while the source is cool and inscrutable. Snowden later told the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, that if ‘I end up in chains in Guantánamo Bay … I can live with it’. Greenwald is a former constitutional and human rights lawyer, and now a journalist who isn’t afraid to point the finger at the conventional and the powerful. Snowden ...”

“... parody of the industrial worker, as represented by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The most exciting young actor of his generation tracked across the Nottingham cobbles, as Cameron was tracked through Notting Hill, by an unseen camera car. The liberation of moving through a city ...”

“... disconcerted when he tells her he’s ‘a bad boy’ and once did a girl in: ‘Even in the dim light she could see that his eyes were cold as lumps of haddock.’ This is a hell of a fright in the middle of the night, but Doris is a tough stick and conceals her shame and fear enough to lead her companions in raucous singing on the coach home the next ...”

“... of why there should be a lot more public expenditure now than in 1913, they shed too little light on the actual, rather messy dynamics of that growth. Of course, good old-fashioned politics have played their historical part, especially at moments of high drama – the creation of the modern welfare state, the vain pursuit of a non-inflationary boom in ...”

“... heavy drinking, Chandler adored his wife. ‘For 30 years, ten months, and four days, she was the light of my life, my whole ambition. Anything else I did was just the fire for her to warm her hands at.’ A few years into his marriage, however, at the height of his business success, Chandler ruined himself with drink. Threatening suicide during his alcohol ...”

“... away,’ Uncle Vanya says, when hope is gone. ‘Work! We’ve got to get to work!’ Early in Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Arthur Seaton stuffs a packet of sandwiches and a flask of tea into his pocket and is soon at work amid the generators and milling machines. ‘He pressed the starter button, and his motor came to life with a ...”

“... things will take care of themselves. The struggle is for the heart, for its claim to stand in the light and cast a shadow its own in the sun. Little wonder, then, that the plot of At Swim, Two Boys hurtles relentlessly towards Easter 1916: both Irish nationalism and queer nationalism locate their mythological origins in an urban riot. Impertinent as it might ...”

“... military allies in the practice of torture for decades. Even the ‘liberal’ argument cited by Alan Dershowitz is suspect: ‘I’m not in favour of torture, but if you’re going to have it, it should damn well have court approval.’ When, taking this line a step further, Dershowitz suggests that torture in the ‘ticking clock’ situation is not ...”

“... were three government ministers, William Waldegrave from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Alan Clark from the DTI and Lord Trefgarne from Defence. On the agenda was what to do about the export of arms and arms-related equipment to the Gulf region in light of the changed circumstances brought about by peace. To the ...”

“... The producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them received 23 Oscar nominations. Levinson himself was to have made Donnie Brasco ...”

“... It is impossible to give a full list, but among those chosen were Peter Quennell, Feliks Topolski, Alan Ross, Kenneth Tynan and Charles Addams, as well as a lot of extras with names like Old B., the Bastard and Chuff. She did not waste her time with intellectuals, but absorbed their appreciation of art and literature. She has always got her nose in Henry James ...”