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“... was part-nationalised in 1975 – and several banks have been as good as nationalised this year. Peter Mandelson recently said that the £2.3 billion in loan guarantees he unlocked for the car industry were no ‘bail-out’, being intended to promote its ‘greening’, but this was just a fancy way of getting access to £1.3 billion from the European ...”

“... let’s have us honey –‘It set the prosodic pattern,’ Berryman told the interviewer, Peter Stitt, who had been a student of his a few years earlier. The interview was conducted in a ward in St Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis, where Berryman seemed to be comfortable. He spent quite a bit of time there during the last few years of his life. In ...”

“... much relish. She was ‘a good drinker’, Leader says of the Swansea original of Mrs Gruffydd-Williams, and while one feels this is very much an Amis-type judgment, it’s not one Leader dissents from – or dissents from sufficiently, drink and good fellowship equated throughout. Never having been able to drink much, partly through not having been ...”

“... to ways of dealing with Britain’s rubbish. ‘Everything is checked,’ she says. Her colleague Peter Robinson chips in. ‘The whole area of waste handling and management is so much more technically sound in the UK than it ever was before.’ He smiles. ‘This country’s history of landfill has actually been quite safe; it has served us well.’ On the ...”

“... author to a little thing he was hosting. Who was there? Oh, you know, the usual crew: Tennessee Williams, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, and Hemingway’s great chum, the one he called ‘the Kraut’: Marlene Dietrich. ‘You could have knocked me over with a pin,’ Styron wrote to his aunt Edith, ‘when Leo took me over to meet Dietrich and she took ...”

“... is worth noting​ how unerring Berlin’s taste was. She spoke of both Chekhov and William Carlos Williams as models. Her characters read Middlemarch the way other people read Flowers in the Attic: dangling from one hand. The editor of A Manual for Cleaning Women, Stephen Emerson, describes exchanging books with her. He gave her Dreiser once and she hated ...”

“... with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa Monica Mountains, then banking briefly over the ...”

“... surprised to find that this was one of the points Hans was to make in his 75th-birthday tribute to Peter Pears, published in 1985. His salute opened with one of those magisterial rebukes, ‘Every musician knows that normally singers are amongst the most unmusicianly, if not indeed unmusical, members of our profession,’ but went on to praise Pears (as ...”

“... of a message delivered by Nestor. In the dream Agamemnon is told that Troy is about to fall. In Peter Green’s translation:But now listen well: I bring word to you from Zeus,who though far distant greatly cares for and pities you.He bids you arm the long-haired Achaians for battlewith all speed, for now you may take the broad-streeted cityof the ...”

“... a date. But most of us would take the question in the ironic, slightly postmodern way Gwyn Alf Williams intended in calling his best book When Was Wales? If European enthusiasts see a Golden Age in the continent’s past, a moment of definition from which all subsequent history has been a decline, what contemporary political needs edged them into such a ...”

“... of the right-minded in 1981. He clearly preferred the company of enlightened Tories such as Peter Carrington or Ian Gilmour to many on the left of his own party. He was a frequent guest in grand houses and a constant luncher at Brooks’s and other haunts of the well-born, well-connected and well-oiled. While in opposition, he could pay for his high ...”

“... sends him a copy of a poem to perk him up. It pays tribute to the American baseball star Ted Williams: ‘Watch the ball and do your thing/This is the moment. Here’s your chance/Don’t let anyone mess with your swing.’ He responds gratefully: ‘Brilliant poem. We need a British version of it.’ Brown hopes this picture is enough to give a sense of ...”

“... Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a rigid censorship to prevent anything like that ever happening ...”

“... Last Summer … I thought you were incredible.’Suddenly, Last Summer (the script is by Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal) is a stagey picture with a gothic plot in which Taylor’s aunt, played by Katharine Hepburn, tries to have her lobotomised to prevent her from revealing that her late son, Sebastian, was homosexual. It features a 27-year-old Taylor as ...”

“... a letter from mother of stale news she’d already relayed over the phone, a card from Oscar Williams inviting us to a cocktail party in New York on the impossible last day of my classes. No news.’ In late 1959, waiting for short story acceptances that would not come, she wrote in her journal: ‘Must not wait for mail as it ruins the day.’ Then the ...”