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“... a slow learner and had a serious stammer. Jane was still to be born at the time he lived in her home, but she encountered Wallop at a ball in later life and thought him presentable enough. Nothing this keen-eyed observer of humanity says of him would suggest that she found him in any way odd. She was, however, less impressed by his dim-witted younger ...”

“... come to Stonehenge.’ I croaked an apology and claimed an imminent, prior appointment with the Lord God Almighty. ‘Oh dear. I am sorry,’ he said. ‘But you would do much better to come to Stonehenge.’This was Empson at 68, shortly after I had got to know him. My initial acquaintance with him was brought about by an overlap of social circles, and, to ...”

“... politicians and generals who sent them there and the anti-war protesters who want to bring them home. They search for the NVA, though they almost never see them. And where these marines are, in the Central Highlands, there is not a Vietnamese civilian in sight. No one but North Vietnamese soldiers to fight up there – ‘fucking pros’, as one marine ...”

“... more recent times, historians have continued to enter reservations. ‘He practised appeasement at home to pursue war abroad’ is a judgment undergraduates are frequently asked to address. Thus Edward has been seen as careless of the rights of the Crown, too little concerned with the maintenance of law and order, too generous in his patronage of nobles, too ...”

“... a crackle and dazzle to it. Fleet Street had no more experienced and mischievous proprietor than Lord Beaverbrook, no more technically gifted editor than Arthur Christiansen, and few more celebrated reporters than the paper’s defence and science correspondent, Chapman Pincher. Out of the Express’s triumvirate of black-glass offices in London, Manchester ...”

“... Elsinore, now a bit of Sweden but then a fief in the gift of the Danish Crown. Tycho became its lord in 1576. In return for the island, the income from other holdings and a share of the tolls charged to shipping through the sound, Tycho undertook to make his King, Frederick II, famous throughout Europe as a patron of the sciences. Tycho’s interests ...”

“... in Europe. An affair also accounted for Mr Tim Yeo in early 1994. Soon after this resignation, Lord Caithness resigned following the suicide of his wife, which apparently was the result of an affair he had been conducting. In 1993, Michael Mates left the government after disclosures that he had sent gifts and messages of support to the businessman Asil ...”

“... nothing. I thought about the disgraced Austrian seaman, a minor character who appears briefly in Lord Jim. He loses his temper and, spitting and huffing, cries out in broken English: ‘I vill an Amerigan citizen begome.’ Conrad’s narrator tells us that as he said this, the seaman was ‘fretting and fuming and shuffling his feet as if to free his ankles ...”

“... Sibil Fox Richardson. Afterwards, Sibil gave Bradley a bag containing a hundred hours’ worth of home movies. They show her at home and in public meetings, on the phone and at work. Sibil is always herself, or rather she is always performing several different selves and yet never not present as an actual person. Bradley ...”

“... around to construct any number of theories, from either point of view. Was it, or was it not, Lord Lucan who murdered the nanny Sandra Rivett? In the 13 years since she was found in the US mailbag at 46 Lower Belgrave Street in London there has been no new evidence. Patrick Marnham’s only novelty is the evidence from Taki, the Spectator ...”

“... Yet our Blairite interim house has about 600 members and the fully reformed one proposed by Lord Wakeham would have 550 (with no statutory upper limit on its numbers). Only the Italian Senate with 326 would approach this. The worldwide norm is for the upper house to be much smaller than the lower – on average about 60 per cent of its ...”

“... and slipped in the violence of their endeavours; drill and auger jolted and shook as they struck home, stuck in bedrock, and could not shake free. The body of the whole began to heave and shudder as if it sought relief from its own intentions. Benjamin Markovits, The Syme Papers Poor Bunbury died this afternoon. Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being ...”

“... him to the Russian desk. There he stole a huge library of MI5 secrets which he stored in his home. He was only caught when he tried to stuff some of the juiciest of these into the letter box of the Second Secretary of the Russian Embassy. Confused by this latest excess of British Intelligence, the secretary immediately shopped Bettaney to his ...”

“... carried all before her, she is now silent when not absent, but on the steps of her Eaton Square home, with Kurdish children clinging to her skirts, three sentences of Thatcherite imperatives mocked with their rhetorical certainty the serviceable prose of her successor and chided him to the most dramatic initiative of his premiership. Her voice rings as if ...”

“... full of allusions to fashionable figures, and elaborately interested in its own making. The home product, by contrast, is solid and deep, staunchly unaware that there are any other cultural products in the world, and firmly convinced that the art which conceals art is the next best thing to having no art at all. On my left, Umberto Eco; on my right ...”