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“... relations officer; and he twice quotes approvingly from an Observer columnist called Melanie Phillips, without revealing that she is his wife) we are introduced to two other urbane and reforming senior judges, the late Lord Chief Justice Taylor and Lord Goff. But it was Messrs Justice Taylor and Goff who, with Lane, refused even a proper appeal to the ...”

“... the celestial sphere. Here is the partly divine Gilgamesh, hero of the earliest poem extant, in Andrew George’s translation: Eleven cubits was his height, Four cubits his chest, from nipple to nipple. A triple cubit his feet and a rod his stride, A triple cubit the beard of his cheek. When Polyphemus rails against Odysseus from the clifftop, Homer asks us ...”

“... Joy and No Fun inspired me to think differently about my own experience as a parent,’ Andrew Solomon observed in his New York Times review. ‘Over and over again, I find myself bored by what I’m doing with my children: how many times can we read Angelina Ballerina or watch a Bob the Builder video? And yet I remind myself that such intimate ...”

“... There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric records? Did Lawrence Durrell commit incest with his daughter, and if he did should the public know about it? The reluctance of his estate ...”

“... in England, John Buchan was sinking towards oblivion, the sort of forgotten bestseller (like Phillips Oppenheim) you find in seaside rental bungalows, a footnote in the biographies of T.E. Lawrence, Beaverbrook and Mackenzie King, and the villain in lachrymose ‘decline of Britain’ books and television series. I think by the end of the Seventies only ...”

“... most disease-stricken populations lived in the most squalid conditions only bolstered the theory. Andrew Mearns’s survey of urban squalor from 1883, The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, describes rooms ‘black with the accretions of filth which have gathered upon them through long years of neglect. It is exuding through cracks in the boards overhead; it is ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port ...”

“... and of the killing of King Richard II.’ Third, on 18 February, one of the players, Augustine Phillips, in signed testimony given under oath, described the play as ‘the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II’. Fourth, at Meyrick’s trial on 5 March, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, asserted that ‘the story of Henry IV being set ...”

“... over the grass’ after police struck an elderly miner on a picket line in Woolley in Yorkshire. Andrew ‘Watty’ Watson, the son of the man who gave Gildea the phrase ‘the backbone of the nation’, was arrested as a teenage striker in November 1984 after giving a two-fingered salute to a bus of strikebreakers, and sacked after he pleaded guilty to ...”

“... Pentecostals and fundamentalists clearly believe their man is in the White House. Kevin Phillips, the author of American Dynasty, has given the association some thought: Biblical scholar Bruce Lincoln’s line-by-line analysis of Bush’s 7 October 2001 address to the nation announcing the US attack on Afghanistan identified a half dozen veiled ...”

“... of being the Conservative Party: Johnson’s contempt for the media – ducking interrogation by Andrew Neil, hiding in a fridge from Piers Morgan of Good Morning Britain and issuing threats about cutting the BBC’s funding – did not injure him. CCHQ pumped out risible, fictitious statistics (Priti Patel at one point claimed a Labour government would mean ...”

“... good on his threat, shooting Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC.Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, was a fierce racist who militantly opposed giving African Americans an equal legal status to whites. He supported the ending of slavery but wanted blacks to be confined to a subordinate caste. That is one of the reasons Radicals in the Republican ...”

“... group (b. 1920-30 and arriving here 1945-60) are such writers as E.A. Markham, A.L. Hendriks, Andrew Salkey, Claude Lushington, Samuel Selvon and Wilson Harris, who write a rather formal, Anglicised, apolitical verse. Markham is the most talented, and his Selected Poems show him to be a more diverse and idiosyncratic figure than even James Berry’s ...”

“... Arthur Balfour, who set him on the path of writing thrillers by introducing him to those of E. Phillips Oppenheim, jokily described by Buchan as ‘the greatest Jewish writer since Isaiah’ – and to the sympathetically depicted Jewish characters who crop up here and there in his fiction. As the Unionist MP for the Combined Scottish Universities, he ...”