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“... is this hunger for ‘media exposure’ (as the spin doctors would call it) entirely due to self-love on the part of individual peers. For the thing that must eventually strike all visitors to the House of Lords is the obsession of its members, whether Labour or Tory, hereditary aristocrats or proletarian life peers, with the survival of the place in some ...”

“... since, the rest of Fuller’s Roman saga – her revolutionary activities, her ‘fall’ into a love affair and unwed motherhood, and her fatal return journey to America – has attained its own mythic status, open to ridicule or heroworship. Vance avoids this. He insists that Fuller’s Roman encounters with Eros in no way denigrated or compromised what he ...”

“... a lovely wife, two lovely daughters and a lovely Porsche. Ralph is ‘a pragmatist ... more of a Harold Wilson than a Ted Heath man’. His life is taken up with the disposal of butter mountains and the regulation of green pounds. Everything has gone well for him. But ‘perhaps it had all been too easy or too well ordered: the safe degree at Oxford, the ...”

“... was a debonair and melancholy old gentleman in his eighties with a slight, drooping resemblance to Harold Macmillan. Since 1919, he had lived as a ward of psychoanalysis, receiving small retainers from Freud, and then from the Freud Society. An American analyst, Muriel Gardiner, befriended him in 1938, and with great devotion and persistence, managed to ...”

“... the Police Department who specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie Foster in his ...”

“... that makes one wonder whether the gap between the Tory Party of Margaret Thatcher and that of Harold Macmillan is greater than the gap between Macmillan and the third Marquess of Salisbury? We shall probably not know until she has gone whether Mrs Thatcher was an erratic episode, a mutant, a comet-like irruption, or a genuine revolutionary who left as ...”

“... most rigidly safeguarded. Personal experience obliges me to agree with him that ‘the love of indirection, the cosiness of a tight personal élite, and the sheer self-importance of government servants, find their clearest expression in the intelligence community.’ In the course of my lengthy researches into the weirdly mixed social and political ...”

“... of politics and sees hilarity in its tiny events. He knows his subjects (‘James Callaghan, the Harold Wilson of politics’). He knows that Mr Healey is clever, and will therefore lose the argument. And he reminds us that Mr Heseltine is ‘a blonde’. Johnson quotes his namesake, the good Doctor, on taking care to see ‘that the Whig dogs should not ...”

“... article of all: a piece written by a ‘disaffected and mentally-disturbed’ American called Harold Spencer under the headline, ‘The Forty-Seven Thousand’. Spencer declared that he had seen a book, kept in ‘the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince’, containing a list of names compiled by German agents: 47,000 eminent English men and women all ...”

“... of Poundians at least. Critics unimpressed by the psychodrama of Eliot’s Christianity, such as Harold Bloom and Helen Vendler, much prefer Yeats and Stevens. And as a glance at any anthology of 20th-century British poetry will show, the prewar voices most audible today belong to Auden and MacNeice. From the maudlin Tom and Viv to Peter Ackroyd’s ...”

“... may hear ‘Sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child,/Warble his native woodnotes wild’. Whatever Harold Bloomian Oedipal reasons one may impute for Milton’s decision to turn his towering literary precursor into an untaught rustic infant, somewhere between Pan and Puck, ‘L’Allegro’ established a tradition characterised by the invention of fanciful ...”

“... every tier, in the whole assembled crush of Valdeners, carried on cantillated waves of explosive love, blasted with their gratitude for having been born Valdeners. Here, at the age of six, Azarya is happy. Growing up, he is mortally oppressed by the New Valdeners’ expectations. ‘Every time I hear how they call me, Azarya ha-kodesh, Azarya the holy ...”

“... In​ 1973, Harold Hering, a decorated Vietnam War rescue pilot, was studying at Vandenberg Air Force Base to become a missile launch officer, a member of an elite group charged with executing the order to launch a nuclear strike. The responsibility was immense, but Hering was persuaded that, at the crew level, there were enough checks and balances to guard against rash behaviour on the part of any individual ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he ...”

“... November 1969, featuring as its biggest splash an extract from Jacqueline Susann’s new book, The Love Machine. ‘Mr Murdoch has not invented sex,’ the Times sniffed after the first issue, ‘but he does show a remarkable enthusiasm for its benefits to circulation.’ That was understatement. In fact, sex was absolutely central to Lamb’s idea of what he ...”