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“... I want to take up some comments on Berlin’s essay by an acute critic of the liberal tradition, Michael Sandel. Berlin ‘comes perilously close to foundering on the relativist predicament’: If one’s convictions are only relatively valid, why stand for them unflinchingly? In a tragically configured moral universe, such as Berlin assumes, is the ideal ...”

“... predominate, and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography ...”

“... place. Brophy and Murdoch, who was a decade older, got on immediately. Brophy had just married Michael Levey, whom she’d met at a New Year’s party. ‘I was struck,’ he said, ‘by her blondeness and the unmissable diamond-like quality of her mind.’ Levey was an assistant keeper at the National Gallery, and it took three dates for them to decide to ...”

“... for the Isle of Dogs, that unlucky swamp, were shredded for the construction of a shelf of towers. Michael Heseltine, a wild-haired, mad-eyed visionary (Klaus Kinski to Margaret Thatcher’s Werner Herzog), pushed Docklands across the Thames to the East Greenwich Peninsula, Bugsby’s Marshes. The obsessive, neurotic and delusional Millennium Dome concept was ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... Isadora Duncan, Alla Nazimova, Pola Negri, Tamara Karsavina, Katharine Cornell, Marie Laurencin, Michael Strange and Eva Le Gallienne in the 1920s and 1930s to Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Hope Williams, Libby Holman, Ona Munson (Belle Watling in Gone with the Wind), Poppy Kirk (a Schiaparelli model and prominent ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... sensational trial of tax fraud and conspiracy. His attorney, the no less legendary Edward Bennett Williams (known as ‘the man to see’), was in effect sending him off on a cruise while he played out the appeals procedure. Confronted with this gargoyle of the old gang, many of the Rhodes boys kept a fastidious distance. ‘But Clinton was there,’ in one ...”

“... all Labour here”’). He came third in the first round of voting among Labour MPs, behind Michael Foot and Callaghan, and promptly withdrew. He then withdrew from domestic politics more comprehensively by becoming president of the European Commission, spending four years in Brussels with limited power and abundant perks. Jenkins raised the profile of ...”

“... seekers. Heavily dosed on Gertrude Stein, and fired up by a chance encounter with William Carlos Williams, Welch was confirmed in his destiny as an outsider, a casual labourer, cab driver, fisherman, backwoods hermit. He had his task, as writer and recorder, but, unlike Snyder, he never found his place. One day, according to rumour, he walked into the forest ...”

“... nor the romantic, nostalgic impulse in British architecture could easily be eradicated.’ Clough Williams-Ellis’s Portmeirion, which somehow escaped being tarred as kitsch, linked architects and writers of opposing tastes in delighted admiration, provided they didn’t look too closely.As Andrew Saint​ has observed, among the first colonisers of the no ...”

“... in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils: In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls ...”

“... witnessed. Formidably intelligent people describe Tristan in terms of a conversion experience. Michael Tanner speaks of its ‘qualifications for religious status’; while for Roger Scruton, Tristan und Isolde offers nothing less than ‘a sacrificial consolation for the imperfect loves of those who witness it’.In the early days, the expressionistic ...”

“... that transcends ‘the left-right divide’. He seemed proud of quotes he’d found that made Michael Oakeshott echo Hannah Arendt – ‘whose work has really influenced my work’ – and Matthew Arnold agree with Lenin, though ‘you couldn’t be further apart than Lenin and Arnold on most things.’ It’s difficult to give a fair account of his ...”

“... 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 ...”