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“... don’t think it is as good as the one of a horse and cart which was quite uninfluenced.’ He is keen to let children know that they are the best judges of their own work and warns them against knowledgable criticism from horsey people.A sculptor as well as a draughtsman, Skeaping had been married to Barbara Hepworth, and the first three children’s ...”

“... had already begun and public transport was appalling. The Serbian Government, like Nato, appears keen to play down suggestions of any environmental damage caused by the bombing raids, but Belgrade buzzes with wild rumours about low-level uranium radiation, pollution and poisoned river water. One tabloid has advised young women not to conceive for another ...”

“... I think it likely – or slightly more than likely – that Peter Saville is the only English graphic artist to have had an actor play him in a major motion picture. The film, 24 Hour Party People, was entertaining in the way that films full of intense people with good accents and daft haircuts always are, and Saville comes off quite well, the genius of the piece in fact, which is probably saying quite a lot, since the Manchester music scene of the late 1970s and 1980s (the setting for the movie) bred self-proclaimed geniuses in the way Sheffield used to produce knives and forks ...”

“... Growing up in Durban in the 1950s, I could see how keen Coloured and Indian cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African cricket was. Take the schoolboy generation I saw rising around me. Playing against Hilton College, I came up against Hylton Ackerman and Mike Procter – the latter opening both the batting and bowling at the age of 13 – while at Durban High School the opening pair of Lee Irvine and Barry Richards had century or double-century partnerships every week; it was impossible to bowl to them ...”

“... Peter Prince’s admirable novel, The Good Father, is about a group of professional-class people in the London Borough of Lambeth, trying to see themselves as liberal and left-wing. They were students together in the late 1960s and are struggling to maintain in the 1980s the package of liberal values (or ‘received ideas’) which they shared so confidently in their youth ...”

“... an underling to ‘get to Moscow and make something happen.’ (Browne was later commissioned by Peter Mandelson ahead of the 2010 general election to write the higher education review that opened the floodgates to the marketisation of British universities.)The Soviet Union owned the pipelines through which all Caspian oil was exported, but with Moscow’s ...”

“... and the legitimacy of the extracurricular activities of the professoriat, especially Marvin’s. Keen to do some good in the world, not least for himself, young Marvin needs the security of tenure, and produces a solid thesis to that end. But one day in Heffers he picks up a book and reads about Bernard Cornfeld. Inspired by that example, he studies the many ...”

“... I was a friend and devoted admirer of Peter Cook for thirty years but I never realised until I read this book how much our early lives had overlapped. We were born in the same week into the same sort of family. His father, like mine, was a colonial servant rushing round the world hauling down the Imperial flag. At one stage both fathers were ensnared in the argument about the most appropriate capital for the West Indies Federation: an argument as vexed as it was futile since the Federation lasted only a few months ...”

“... which created a writer’s paper. People who put their powers of invention into words are usually keen to have them printed in traditional form. They want a proper book or newspaper, which has led to the look of pages changing much more slowly than their content and explains why the dropped initial, italicised passages, rules, subheadings, and most of the ...”

“... consider me as the writer of the proposed obituaries? I don’t cope well with pressure. I was keen to stay on Hegley’s order-form, and suddenly I realised that the most decisive way both to explain my tardiness and to appeal for sympathy would be to tell him that I had been lately dealing with my own, rather proximate obituary: I told Hegley that my ...”

“... when David’s problem first surfaced in the summer I had received a telephone call from a very keen Spurs supporter, who I knew was very friendly with Terry Venables ... He chit-chatted for a couple of minutes, and then he suddenly said: ‘I’ve got Terry’s number on holiday, and he would be very interested in hearing from you.’ I politely declined ...”

“... well as clever. They admit no necessary divide between literary and scientific imagination and are keen to move from story to theory, theory to tinkering in the garage, and from tinkering to the stars. When you start to make even small moves of a practical nature the fun starts. Take the case of Dora Kent’s head. Way back in 1968 her son Saul had been ...”

“... The ‘cash for ash’ scandal in Northern Ireland revealed that both Sinn Féin and the DUP were keen to avoid writing anything down, in part out of fear of future FOI requests. In 2017, the Scottish information commissioner concluded that the devolved government in Edinburgh’s FOI procedures were ‘inherently wrong’ and ‘contrary to the spirit’ of ...”

“... Sir Peter Hall is a man of Notes. He is a director of plays who has become Director of the National Theatre. The skills of play directors are not those of performers (like his predecessor at the National, Lord Olivier). Play directors pride themselves on their ability to give what they call Notes. This sort of Note (scarcely recognised by dictionaries) is not the sort manual workers make, in notebooks or on notepaper: it is mouth work ...”

“... undressed, who turns out to have a skin and limbs that also come off; in another, a father who is keen on the need for love dematerialises in the sitting-room. There’s an element of Science Fiction, and a rather poetic story about a mime, but the most telling is called ‘War Crimes’. It deals with what is clearly a favourite topic, the fascist ravages of ...”