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“... in which the pupils are half-hidden under the eyelids; as if the eyes had stopped between floors. Spike Lee has similar eyes, which I find attractive, maybe because they give a sense of inhabiting worlds other than this; they are, of course, irritating for exactly the same reason.A call from Barry Cryer, who claims to have heard a woman outside ...”

“... contentious subject which has recently been in the news again. The reason on this occasion is Spike Lee’s brilliantly corrosive satire, Bamboozled. Pressed to improve the ratings of the network at which he is the only black staff writer, Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) comes up with the idea of reviving blackface minstrelsy. Although he imagines ...”

“... of the Edinburgh Addiction Cohort, 228 of the 794 Muirhouse heroin-users had died by 2007, with a spike in HIV deaths, just as Trainspotting was being published, in the mid-1990s. No formal follow-up has been published since 2010, but Robertson says that ‘a lot of the latest updates are increasing numbers of deaths, from all causes, but ten or fifteen years ...”

“... not first in cinema, but on the radio. Round about the time Ealing comedy was at its zenith, Spike Milligan (whose humour Stubbs admits to disliking) began meeting with old army friends at Grafton’s, a London pub, and planting the seeds of The Goon Show, which would mount a surreal full-frontal assault on British establishment mores. It was first ...”

“... friends casting him as a Catholic martyr, preserving relics including his head – stolen from a spike on London Bridge after his daughter Margaret bribed a guard – and writing hagiographic accounts of his life. Early Protestant accounts were more conflicted. In his ‘Book of Martyrs’ John Foxe was torn between describing More the humanist poet and More ...”

“... shape of The Guns of Navarone (1961), adapted from a novel by Alistair MacLean and directed by J. Lee Thompson. By the beginning of the 1960s, the war’s most photogenic episodes had all been used up: The Colditz Story, The Dam Busters, Sink the Bismarck! It was time to let the old action adventure format loose on some vaguely plausible military ...”

“... February​ , after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the word ‘oligarch’ experienced a brief spike in Google searches, just as a volley of Western sanctions hit these Russian billionaire businessmen, who were deemed responsible for propping up the government of Vladimir Putin. The oligarchs are a diverse bunch, but they have certain characteristics in ...”

“... chair of judges, a backbench MP called Malcolm Craig, shows no overlap with either Hermione Lee (2006) or Robert Macfarlane (2013). The Elysian judges for 2013 are Jo Cross, a columnist whose criterion for imaginative literature is its ‘relevance’; Penny Feathers, retired from the Foreign Office and attempting to write topical thrillers; Tobias ...”

“... just money on display. In Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, she describes the overweening spike of Renzo Piano’s Shard as ‘a glass and concrete arrangement of the Qatar sovereign wealth fund’.* The loudest crimes are hidden in plain sight. Look around, you can’t miss them. The topography of complacent surrender. She has a special interest ...”

“... critical call) – rhyme scheme: ‘Mandy’, ‘handy’, ‘dandy’. Waller trills ‘Lalala-lee-lo’ quite sarcastically and scrambles the lyrics with an indescribable gurgling sound. ‘Mandy’ was featured in a new Eddie Cantor movie, Kid Millions, and the recording aimed to capitalise on this. Waller’s scornful attack is thus especially ...”

“... his reported remark to Nancy: ‘Honey, I forgot to duck.’ But, in any case, he experienced a spike in approval ratings and became what the pollster Stuart Spencer called ‘a martyred surviving hero’.Reagan did have something to offer the ideologues. He refused to negotiate with striking air traffic controllers and ultimately crushed their union. This ...”

“... the majority of their price rises in the same period were ten times that. Food prices may not spike again as they did between 2005 and 2008, but they’re unlikely to return to 2005 levels.The best short document about the way things go from here remains the Chatham House study, Food Futures. Hardin Tibbs, an independent strategic analyst drafted onto the ...”