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“... pants that her mother, Alma, had sewn for the kindergarten pageant were quick to betray her. It’s tempting to see this as a primal scene for Doris Day, the moment from which her longheld stage fright sprang. ‘This shy goddess,’ John Updike once wrote, ‘who avoids parties and live audiences, fascinates us with the amount of space we imagine between her ...”

“... main threat to London lungs. The ‘London Particular’, the ‘pea-souper’ that was the city’s brand for so many centuries, has not been seen since, and – logically, scientifically – should never be seen again. But then, that’s what they thought before 1962.Christine ...”

“... Conspiracy theorists are often simply nuts. Ferguson may be a conspiracy theorist as well, but if so he isn’t letting on. In this, his fourth autobiography, he has a chapter about his interests outside football. One of his passions is the Kennedy assassination, to which he has devoted a lot of time and a fair bit of money, collecting documents, videos and ...”

“... Dennis Brown concludes his celebration of Anglo-American Modernism with an account of Ezra Pound’s death on 30 October 1972. ‘That year I ended an obituary of Pound in a Canadian student newspaper: Pound is now dead and no poet remains of his stature. But poetry is “NEWS that stays NEWS” ...”

“... of all-seeing sufficiency, leaves a great deal out, including the rules governing the country’s electoral system: the principle of first past the post is an integral feature of the constitutional order, but nowhere is this actually specified. In fact, it is rare for modern constitutions to fix the details of the electoral system. This is perhaps because ...”

“... three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ It seems that Crusoe’s narrative cannot encompass a state of mind which, having neither a past nor a future, is not strictly narratable. The gestures and motions are not recognisably the product of the man he once was, and they do not prefigure the man he will become (the one they ...”

“... David Peterley’s Peterley Harvest was first published on 24 October 1960. The book had a curious history and, shortly before publication, stories began to appear in the press declaring it to be an elaborate hoax. The jacket of the book contained the information that David Peterley was the only son of an old Quaker family that had ‘lived in the Chilterns and been neighbours of Milton and the Penns ...”

“... Like many​ recent political memoirists, Gordon Brown begins his story in medias res. Given his rollercoaster time in Downing Street, punctuated by the gut-wrenching drama of the financial crisis, there should have been plenty of arresting moments to choose from. Some, though, are already taken. Alistair Darling, for instance, starts Back from the Brink, his 2011 account of what it was like being Brown’s chancellor, on Tuesday, 7 October 2008, when Sir Tom McKillop, the chairman of RBS, called him to announce that his bank was about to go bust and to ask what the government planned to do about it ...”

“... The​ day David died, I was in the Urbana Free Library, in the How to Organise section. I was always searching for ways to corral my home. Paper and books were my biggest downfall, but clothes didn’t stay on hangers and dishes multiplied. A lot of things multiplied. Especially books about how to organise your house ...”

“... not to bark at bears, but slyly, gently, slink, big-eyed as children behind their shepherd’s greeting. Ambling, bears, always ambling … mooching to Mi-develeskey Tem, My God’s Town, and the God for all bears too, God of paws and padding, of Polar, Kodiak and Koala; sniffing superiorly through Dinelo Tem, the ...”

“... motion, Cameron declared that public opinion was the decisive factor. He said that Parliament’s decision reflected the views of the British people, which was why it had to be respected. Ed Miliband said that the House of Commons had ‘spoken for the people of Britain’. It might be tempting to think that the past few weeks mark a watershed in the ...”

“... achiever in government, also went happily without. Across the Channel, de Gaulle had one but so, it is salutary to recall, did Poujade and, in an earlier era, Boulanger. Nevertheless, for the moment, we have Thatcherism, seen variously by admirers and by the less convinced in terms of both style and ideology. Mrs Thatcher’s ...”

“... That the next general election will be fought by Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Leader of the Opposition David Cameron we do know; but how it will be fought we don’t, in part because the present prime minister will not disclose when he intends to go. Furthermore, both Cameron and Brown are in some senses, but for different reasons, unknown quantities ...”

“... When David Davis, the shadow home secretary, announced his resignation as an MP on 12 June – in order to fight a by-election for his own seat on an issue about which he was in total agreement with his party’s line, on which in fact he was his party’s line – the media nearly choked with delight ...”

“... folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in ...”