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“... ending the meeting five minutes early – to keep Maggie sweet.) Thatcher secured an invitation to Camp David, where she intended to remind Reagan of some hard political truths. Her principal aide, Charles Powell, drafted a memo in which he laid bare the core of the argument she would need to get across to the president (the emphasis comes from Thatcher’s ...”

“... can be both, you know) of Coleridge and Keats and Byron, but he seems to be particularly fond of William Blake, a poet I find crude and clumsy. Poetically Blake is as naive as he is primitive as a draughtsman: an illustrator of Biblical themes who entertains metaphysical pretensions above his station of the cross. ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright’ – this ...”

“... What kept them going? Many sailors referred to comradeship as their finest memory of the Navy. William ‘Jock’ Batters (Plumber First Class) wrote in his unpublished memoir: When a sailor ‘belonged’ to a ship his main loyalty was to his ship and his mates. If they endured enough together, his family came second. How other can you explain the ...”

“... Hart Crane’s The Bridge, she was appalled that such a small book cost three dollars. Even summer camp offered no respite: Rose came along to help out and humiliated her son by following him around.In 1931, Schwartz went to the University of Wisconsin. In his excellent biography Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet (1977), James Atlas describes the ...”

“... get briefly adopted by the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The man who started this frivolous auction was William Safire, former speechwriter to Richard Nixon and now columnist for the New York Times. He it was who, during the dismal days of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, came up with ‘Koreagate’, ‘Peanutgate’, ‘Billygate’ and – his own ...”

“... the medical reformer and Julian Huxley the socially-conscious scientist helped to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country ...”

“... the missionary Journeys; the Miracles; the Revelations; the Agony’. Reviewing a biography of Sir William Stephenson, a figure in British wartime intelligence, he declined even to list its inaccuracies: ‘To make such a charge against this biographer would be unfair. It would be like urging a jellyfish to grit its teeth and dig in its heels.’ In his 1951 ...”

“... call-up in the summer of 1941. Smith writes well about Williams’s war, both on the inanities of camp-bound life between 1941 and 1944, and then on the terrifyingly immediate chance of being burned alive in an armoured vehicle while on active service. Williams served right through, from the invasion of Normandy to the end of hostilities, as an officer in an ...”

“... in New York earned just $1.12 a week, even lower than factory work.A pill compounder called Dr William Evans had premises on her street. Evans sold pills for everything from constipation to ‘low spirits’ to ‘hypochondriacism’ (this seems an especially clever wheeze). Evans has an air of Doctor Dulcamara in Donizetti’s 1832 opera L’Elisir ...”

“... the rest of Hong Kong, ‘ceded in perpetuity’, back to mother China. That lion-hearted Liberal William Ewart Gladstone, who died while he was trying to solve the Irish Question, said of the First Opium War, which ended with Hong Kong under British rule: ‘a war more unjust in its origin, a war more calculated in its progress to cover this country with ...”

“... 25,000 communists were in ‘protective custody’. Dachau, the first official concentration camp, was set up to hold them. Hobsbawm, whose parents had died within two years of each other, was living with his aunt in the Halensee district. He was not a member of the KPD, but of its dependency the Sozialistischer Schülerbund (Socialist Students ...”

“... years.One example is McGurl’s discussion of ‘meta-slave narrative’, a genre illustrated by William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), the first-person novelisation of a historical account left by a rebel slave awaiting execution. By ‘refusing the perspectival limitations imposed by his own whiteness,’ McGurl claims, Styron’s novel ...”

“... or in what Othello calls ‘the palate of my appetite’: ‘I had been happy if the general camp,/Pioneers and all, had tasted her sweet body.’ But such images are complicated by their subterranean connection with the Moor’s memories of actual cannibalism in a speech that might imply a dangerous affinity between this ‘erring barbarian’ and the ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... Molly​ Keane’s gloriously camp novel, Good Behaviour, begins with the narrator, Aroon St Charles, a 57-year-old survivor of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy, murdering her aged mother with a rabbit mousse. She doesn’t choke on it: Aroon has made sure that the quenelle in cream sauce is perfect, with ‘just a hint of bay leaf and black pepper, not a breath of the rabbit foundation’, the mousse irreproachable ‘after it has been forced through a fine sieve and whizzed for ten minutes in a Moulinex blender ...”