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“... is continuously entertaining. The title does not mean she is taking a trial canter round Dick Francis’s paddock. The demise in question is that of an operatic prima donna of Italian-American extraction, in conception (and in physique) somewhere between Callas and Caballé. The lady, who has been pursued for months by a malicious paparazzo, is found ...”

“... East experts identified long ago as having the most influence over American Middle East policy, Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami. Now in his late eighties, Lewis came to the US from the UK some thirty years ago to teach at Princeton. His fervent anti-Communism and disapproval of everything about contemporary Arabs and Islam pushed him to the forefront of the ...”

“... about the Belgrano. I have no difficulty in imagining this scene. From 1964-70, I was the late Dick Crossman’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, and had a ringside seat which enabled me to witness how berserk Harold Wilson, as Prime Minister, would go about leaks. I suspect this is in the nature of prime ministers, particularly those who live in Number ...”

“... unavowable, in Britain. At the height of the Westland saga the Prime Minister’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, found time to denounce publicly those journalists who had dared to print the name of the head of MI6, Christopher Curwen. The heads of the CIA and the KGB, William Casey and Victor Chebrikov, are of course public figures. But that, as Mr Ingham ...”

“... you might call an ‘aide de camp’. (Less politely, ‘shonnary’: ‘I always leave the dick out.’) The Rilke joke – ‘“The last time I saw him was in a café in Trieste. He cried.” “He often cried. But nobody heard him among the angelic orders”’ – palls on the reprise. Far worse, much as one welcomes relief in that area, is the ...”

“... do so.No one in Washington has indulged in this form of shame more fiercely than Rumsfeld, except Dick Cheney. In Bush at War, Rumsfeld is presented as a grouchy, beguiling politician. ‘In some respects,’ Woodward writes, he ‘was a walking example of what novelist Wallace Stegner calls “resilience under disappointment”, the persistence of ...”

“... a stalwart of light entertainment broadcasting in the 1950s. He once introduced a talk by George Bernard Shaw. ‘Young man,’ Shaw said, pointing to the microphone, ‘this is a devilish contraption. You can’t deceive it – so don’t try.’ Gamlin later said he remembered all his life the genial advice Shaw had given him. He didn’t want to deceive ...”

“... and Angela became Deborah, with parents called Cathy and Richard Harry, also known as Caggie and Dick. Caggie’s family had once owned a bank in Ridgewood, New Jersey; Dick worked as a salesman for Alkan Silk Woven Labels in Paterson. A sister, Martha, arrived six years later. ‘My little accidental family’ gets ‘a ...”

“... is no reason why Tom, who plays a cornet, should be in a lower social or musical grade than Dick, who plays the violin.’ But the harsh fact was that it took more time and money to become the solo performer of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto than to play a transcription for cornet of Va Pensiero: and that kind of time and money were not available to ...”

“... book has some supple, remarkably powerful readings to offer of Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick (‘the Shakespeare of science fiction’), A.E. Van Vogt, Kim Stanley Robinson and a range of others. Jameson has always been an energetic retriever of the neglected and maligned, and a brilliant salvage job here on Charles Fourier reflects this ...”

“... were Reginald and Clovis (not a name, as Samuel Goldwyn would have said, to be given to every Tom, Dick and Harry). Reginald believed that the religious system which had given us green Chartreuse would never really die. Here he is, showing off to a duchess at the Carlton: ‘There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they ...”

“... but with no detail at all. On 14 April 1975 it was: ‘dinner at the house of gallery-owner Claude Bernard with George Lawson (drunk) and Mick Jagger – excellent food but boring really.’ In vain you look for an account of the conversation that made the evening so tedious, or even a soupçon of insight into what made the food so good. Nothing. Not here, not ...”

“... and lasting friendships including those with Gilbert Ryle, Stuart Hampshire, Guy Liddell and Dick White, who after the war became the head of MI5 and then MI6 – an invaluable contact. And Trevor-Roper enjoyed the company of Kim Philby, whom he found the most intelligent and sophisticated of his colleagues. After the war, he interrogated Nazi prisoners ...”

“... Internet comes after the Somme. Hall may dislike trendy theories, but this is a bit like Jeffrey Bernard campaigning against drinking clubs. Whatever his reservations, he does stand for all the Right Things in the arena of cultural studies: impeccably anti-essentialist, anti-totalising, anti-reductionist, anti-naturalist and anti-teleological. In a furiously ...”

“... Christian evangelicals like Gary Bauer, Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed and Pat Robertson, as well as Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, former majority leaders in the House of Representatives, all of whom believe Israel’s rebirth is the fulfilment of biblical prophecy and support its expansionist agenda; to do otherwise, they believe, would be contrary to God’s ...”