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“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... style, and built by George Gilbert Scott in 1856. It’s over Exeter’s garden wall in the north-west corner of Radcliffe Square, but you can’t quite see that. This was where I worked, though it was possible if one was so inclined to get to study in the much more exclusive and architecturally splendid surroundings of the Codrington, and a few ...”

“... Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of ...”

“... revive a German army and pelt the Soviet Union with atom bombs. But later still, I went to live in West Germany and learned not to sneer when young Germans said earnestly that they felt European, not German. Europe to them meant neutrality, reconciliation, open frontiers. A few years before, some of them had gone to the bridge over the Rhine at Kehl/Strasbourg ...”

“... talked about, and Nick Carraway, Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, come to New York from the Middle West, can both identify with Gatsby as a figure of mystery and charm, and also consider him objectively as a focus for speculation. Gossip and speculation go together. Anthony Powell’s narrator, Nick Jenkins, has the engaging ...”

“... the National to the Queen’s and is now previewing, though not without incident. Stage hands in West End theatres are used to long runs and find it hard to turn productions round as deftly as they do in repertory. Tonight, as the lights go down at the end of the first scene of ‘A Question of Attribution’, I wait on the sliding truck for the projection ...”

“... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty ...”

“... born, Jewish, Cambridge-educated, critically middle-aged etc), lecturer at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands, is discovered begowned (it being graduation day) screwing a begowned finalist on his office floor. It is not a joyous coupling. Sefton’s mind is not on the job, but on his office door which he fears may be unlocked. His mind slips back to an ...”

“... Roundabout in the East, Archway Tavern in the North, the Robin Hood Gate of Richmond Park in the West, and the Catford Odeon in the South. Eight of us are going to ride from John O’Groats to Land’s End: that way, because it is downhill, though into the wind, and easier to get back from, but most of all because we will fall among friends. Rose Hilton is ...”

“... first came when Churchill in 1942 appointed him Minister Resident at Allied Headquarters in North-West Africa. It is not too much to say that the job ‘made’ him. It was essentially a position which depended on the influence its occupant could exert, not the power, which was negligible. Macmillan had an American mother and he spoke excellent French. As ...”

“... of suited twentysomethings. A few minutes’ walk up Fleet Street brings you to Number 188, to the west of St Dunstan’s Church, opposite Ye Olde Cock Tavern, and in an echo of Peter Blayney’s central themes (the business of books, and the Reformation), close to the publishers D.C. Thomson (the Beano, the Dandy, Scotland’s Sunday Post) and the Protestant ...”

“... and flora Trump was wrecking there. I like wind power, and loved You’ve Been Trumped (2011), Anthony Baxter’s documentary about the local people who had been campaigning against the development, and who looked, at that time, like they might win. I also wanted to see what Trump actually looked like in person; he’d been popping up in my dreams from ...”

“... the risks lay the advantage: embracing mortal danger could bring vast power and material rewards. Anthony Jenkinson, who became an important figure in the Muscovy Company, was as content wandering the White Sea or racing through a Russian winter on a sledge as he was dining with Ivan the Terrible, drinking from a cup he valued at £400. Jenkinson’s itch for ...”

“... secret war it has conducted against the Palestinians, especially following the occupation of the West Bank and Sinai in 1967. It shows how Aman, the Shin Bet and Mossad, while maintaining their prewar functions, greatly expanded their regular activities to meet the security requirements of Greater Israel. Aman retained its overall responsibility for national ...”

“... illegally seized power in 1965. Britain did not identify with the East Timorese or the people of West Sahara when they were taken over by the Indonesians and Moroccans in 1975 – even though 50,000 Timorese died in a genocidal disaster defending the same right that Britain claims for the Falklanders. Nor was much democratic nonsense heard about rights of ...”