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“... to which she refers is the inquiry being conducted by a new officer of her House, Sir Gordon Downey, Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. Sir Gordon is investigating allegations of corruption made against certain MPs by the Guardian newspaper. The allegations referred to payments and relationships between ...”

“... have said, Gertrude c’est moi): but at least it was alive, as Stewart is alive in Myself and Michael Innes. Exposing herself to the latest critical viruses, for she has always been sedulous in keeping up, Mary perhaps decided when composing hers that she did not exist as an individual after all? At least both books share the most engaging ...”

“... decision worth pondering. Shadbold’s roulette and James’s chapter of accidents become poker in Gordon Williams’s lively novel Pomeroy. Up there in Dawson City, One-Eye Riley the mad gambler was asked: ‘Is it true you regard poker as a matter of life or death?’ He replied: ‘Hell, no, cards is serious.’ John Stockley Pomeroy is a West Point ...”

“... The American Military Adventure in Iraq (the most bearable of these excruciating war volumes), Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s Cobra II, George Packer’s The Assassins’ Gate, Peter Galbraith’s The End of Iraq, and now Woodward: these books and many others present their versions of what went wrong, aim for a culprit, and hope that a firing ...”

“... of real-life American stand-ups who’ve spectacularly scuttled their own careers (Louis C.K., Michael Richards), but the veniality of Manny’s ‘emotional misconduct’ (he slept with each of his accusers once, proposed marriage, then never called) suggests we’re not to dwell too much on them. Bordas wants to give him the trappings of disgrace without ...”

“... often with non-publishing or foreign management at the highest level. Penguin, Hamish Hamilton, Michael Joseph, Frederick Warne and Longman – all once imprints with independent identities – now congregate within the Pearson group (best known for its ownership of the Financial Times). Random House UK (whose American parent was long since swallowed up by ...”

“... left behind were that it should be used in any way possible – short of falling into the hands of Michael Winner – ‘to make money for my boys’: Mark Pearce, her second husband, and Alexander, the couple’s son, born in 1983. As Edmund Gordon says towards the beginning of his biography, Carter was never so widely ...”

“... the average Yugoslav and why the average Scot earns less than the average English man or woman. Michael Porter’s The Competitive Advantage of Nations is audacious (or foolhardy) enough to offer an answer. Its aim is nothing less than a systematic explanation of the wealth of nations, with 52 pages of policy recommendations added on for good ...”

“... he writes of a mythical bush creature.) And it has something, too, of Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, only that here the Blacks don’t live on the Pole: they have to take a ship to get there. ‘I had started on a voyage of discovery, only to find that it was I who was being discovered,’ Kpomassie realises once he finally ...”

“... a rampant adventure-tale of a male rogue, or rogue male, on the loose between two marriages. Mary Gordon’s Men and Angels shows a happily-married heroine struggling tenaciously, in her husband’s absence, to preserve her own integrity by defending her home and children against an intruder. Life goes on is a sequel to A Start in Life (1970 – not to be ...”

“... to an English-language bookshop – there’s even one at the railway station – to buy a copy of Michael Crichton’s new novel, Next (HarperCollins, £17.99). But why go to the trouble of spending the whole of Wednesday morning buying a book, when I could just download it now, on Tuesday evening? Diesel eBooks were offering Next in three formats: I plumped ...”

“... use to reel in audiences a century later.In his introduction to the new Penguin Classics edition, Michael Tondre calls this ‘a procedural problem that Oil! never resolves, but rather converts into a source of ongoing fictional intrigue. How to more properly hate oil … becomes both an ideological impasse and a literary plot.’ His confidence that the ...”

“... and assume that Labour will sooner or later come a cropper. The Australian strategies adopted by Michael Howard and his advisers at this election were, on the other hand, very risky and, in the end, mistaken, exaggerating as they did the significance of immigration and crime within British politics. Many people ‘care’ about immigration and crime, but ...”

“... a hair’s breadth of becoming deputy leader of the Party. Opinions differ, but a Party led by Michael Foot and Benn would probably have seen a mass defection of MPs to the SDP. As it was, Benn’s failure paved the way for Neil Kinnock’s purge of the Militant Left, as well as the crucial policy switch from renationalisation of key industries to ...”

“... wave’ science fiction, a quasi-modernist movement centred on New Worlds and figures such as Michael Moorcock, who took over from Carnell as the magazine’s editor in 1964, and M. John Harrison, who became its literary editor in 1968.Ballard’s own fiction was by then moving into its second major phase. This followed a second life-defining trauma. In ...”