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“... self-regard. He was a monster of excess, capable when he was behind on a deadline of writing day in day out for 18 hours out of the 24, and of sleeping for just as long in his intervals of exhaustion. If his complaining correspondence were to be believed, you might assume that writing and sleeping were all he had time ...”

“... Fielding, no softie on crime, was surprised that there were not far more criminals. The other day, in a reference to the recent riots in Newcastle, the Archbishop of Canterbury, after mentioning that in the late 18th century some children were employed in mines or mills for six days a week, quoted the Bishop of Chester as saying in 1785 that on Sundays ...”

“... Harrison, professor of social history at Warwick, but Jack Jones and Stan Newens MP; not only Robin Blackburn of New Left Review but Mike le Cornu, shop steward at Heathrow. They all, with remarkably few reservations, agree with Hobsbawm not only that there is a crisis of capitalism but that the apparent ineffectiveness of the Left is, therefore, all the ...”

“... for the feminist movement the label of bra-burners. Nothing had actually been set on fire that day – the town, which was worried about its wooden boardwalks, had refused to give a permit – and the label was highly selective: in addition to the offending undergarment, the women dumped copies of Playboy and Cosmopolitan, eyelash curlers, false ...”

“... is slowly destroying the Labour Party, and it will not be rescued by a reasonable competence at day-to-day management – any more than the Conservative Party could be rescued by Major’s government in its last couple of years. In judging this government, therefore, we should look beyond such economic competence, however ...”

“... you,’ he said, ‘when it fires it’s as if a horse has kicked you back from the grave.’ Robin Robertson, the poet and editor, was born with a heart in which one of the valves – the aortic valve – was composed of only two cusps instead of the usual three. The aortic valve prevents backflow from the aorta into the principal ventricle of the ...”

“... seat, said or did nothing at all on his own account – no leading questions in the style of Sir Robin, no Paxmanite raised eyebrows. His job, performed perfectly, was to instruct (no, not invite) speakers to answer each other; and monitor to the second the share of time they were taking. ‘Answer that in 28 seconds, Bengt Westerberg,’ he coolly told the ...”

“... with devastating consequences for Kuwait, and later for the Kurds and Shi’a of southern Iraq. Robin Cook’s backtracking on the fate of the British nurses, after his indignant outburst to the effect that a sentence of 500 lashes has no place in a modern society, was not only inspired by the thought that shouting at Saudis is an unreliable way to persuade ...”

“... visitors who saw them in public galleries is less clear. Like van Meegeren, he became a kind of Robin Hood folk hero, the little man – and nearly all forgers, at least those who’ve been caught, are men – against the establishment.But the forger’s forger, strongly represented in the show, struck a different pose. Eric Hebborn was an alumnus of the ...”

“... her van) was able to live. October 1969 When she is not in the van Miss S. spends much of her day sitting on the pavement in Parkway, where she has a pitch outside Williams and Glyn’s Bank. She sells tracts, entitled ‘True View: Mattering Things’, which she writes herself though this isn’t something she will admit. ‘I sell them but so far as the ...”

“... important a subject to be trusted to a woman. The Boxes were unusual but not quite alone in their day. Jill Craigie was making documentaries and Cooke points to a clutch of films from A Taste of Honey to The Belles of St Trinian’s in which women were involved as writers, directors or editors and in which the female characters became noticeably more ...”

“... the bar (Campbell, remember, is teetotal). His corpse was discovered washed up on a beach the next day. McAra lived in Balham; his mother was named as next of kin in his passport. In the chunkiest biography of Lang that the narrator consults, McAra has only five or six entries in the index: there’s ‘no reason in other words why anyone outside the party or ...”

“... you grew up in. Does it sound like it might be fun for you?’ Chip doesn’t come back that day; he gets involved with a Lithuanian official who employs him to help run an Internet scam from Vilnius, and off he goes. Meanwhile, Enid sets out on Nordic Pleasurelines with her thoughts of Christmas and with Alfred behind her, coughing back his ...”

“... in the 1970s for a rock band to call itself Supertramp in homage to his autobiography. But present-day readers seem to feel much as Auden did, when he took up Davies for a few weeks as a schoolboy, ‘without finding what I really wanted’. The copy of Later Days I looked at in the London Library (most of his works now being out of print) is full of ...”

“... to make of his impressions. The thrush’s message sounds good, he thinks: ‘No singer of the day or night/is lucky as I am.’ But can it be trusted? Is the thrush a properly mythological bird – a latter-day Philomel or Procne – or a relative of the kitsch robin at the end of ...”