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“... never wore the same outfit for more than a few hours. She was also a hypochondriac. Her colleague David Scherman (who took the famous picture of Miller in Hitler’s bathtub) later remembered that ‘you named a disease and Lee would imagine she had it in no time at all.’ Regina Lisso, Town Hall, Leipzig (1945) by Lee Miller. Lee Miller ...”

“... Shortly after the Sunday Times’s enforced move into the London Docklands, David Blundy and Jon Swain were strolling towards the new production plant’s heavily-guarded entrance. These two foreign correspondents are used to witnessing military activity (you may remember Swain as a character in Roland Joffe’s movie, The Killing Fields), but they were astonished to see an armoured car with a full complement of Royal Marines apparently patrolling inside the heavily-fortified perimeter fence ...”

“... A revised edition of the Norton Anthology commissioned a translation of Beowulf from Heaney, and David Damrosch’s Longman Anthology of British Literature advocated a linguistically complicated idea of what ‘British’ meant. Sean Shesgreen’s ‘Short History of The Norton Anthology of English Literature’, published in Critical Inquiry in 2009, quotes ...”

“... early in life, it might lead anywhere. Look what happened to the daughter of Councillor Alfred Roberts of Grantham. ‘Perhaps the main interest which my father and I shared while I was a girl was a thirst for knowledge about politics and public affairs,’ Baroness Thatcher tells us in The Path to Power, thus confirming the centrality of Councillor (later ...”

“... and society hostesses on his annual home leaves, in having himself appointed second-in-command to Roberts in South Africa, Commander-in-Chief under Curzon in India (until their famous quarrel resulted in Curzon’s resignation) and the Governor-General of Egypt – from which stepping-stone he confidently expected to return to India as Viceroy. The often ...”

“... assault. The political centre of the court now shifted from Kennedy to the chief justice, John Roberts. Appointed by George W. Bush in 2005, Roberts was at one time a reliable Republican. He has been a bit less predictable of late, principally because, as chief justice, he is trying to ensure that the court retains a ...”

“... Known only to his lovers and a few in his inner circle, the Game has now been made public in Neil Roberts’s remarkable biography of the poet, published almost a decade after Redgrove’s death, along with a new Collected Poems. The revelations in Roberts’s book have an undeniably voyeuristic fascination but they also ...”

“... thought better of it, retired smartly into the nearest town, and was once again surrounded. Lord Roberts spoke exasperatedly of his ‘strange fancy for being besieged’. Both Roberts and Kitchener clearly regarded him as a liability. But being besieged had already made his name. Brilliantly laconic despatches from ...”

“... To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and tells the story of how a lonely creative writing teacher, Fran, becomes involved with a cop (Mark Ruffalo) who is investigating a string of particularly gruesome murders ...”

“... Cobbett called her ‘the Old Bishop in petticoats’), was already a celebrity. William Roberts, the family friend entrusted with the task of producing the book, made her into a saint. He presented her as a vessel chosen by God, who had carried her ‘through great temptations and trials’ to her ‘exemplary eminence’. Among Hannah More’s ...”

“... thoughts occur like ‘I bet Tom Stoppard doesn’t have to do this’ or ‘There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling.’ So I was happy to read in Gavin Lambert’s Mainly about Lindsay Anderson* that Lindsay harboured similar thoughts about such self-imposed menialities. On the eve of filming O Lucky Man Lindsay has his ailing ...”

“... light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had broken at long last and this was the first male role I was ...”

“... would need 100,000 reinforcements to stop them. Similar ideas were propagated subsequently by Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener when they were commanders-in-chief in India. The generals had found a good way of extracting money from the Treasury at a time when the army was finding it hard to compete with the Royal Navy for exiguous funds. The invasion bogey had ...”

“... add much to what we know about the attempted coup; in some respects it tells us less than Adam Roberts’s excellent The Wonga Coup.* Roberts names more names than Mann does, including Jeffrey Archer’s (he may have donated money), and gives some broad hints as to the identity of Mann’s equivalent of Sir James ...”

“... Web of Corruption, which tells the story of John Poulson and T. Dan Smith. Raymond Fitzwalter and David Taylor took eight years to research and write their analysis of the most far-reaching corruption trial of this century. The opening summary is startling. Of those prosecuted in connection with Poulson 21 were convicted on corruption charges. There were ...”