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“... lambent dullness played around his face’) – satire as longing, as true poetry. David Nichol Smith said: ‘He could not have given us our greatest epic; but he is our greatest satirist.’ Pope, who offers some strong competition, must have learned from Dryden the interaction of these two ideas. The gift ...”

“... Early on, Jones mounts a pre-emptive defence against an accusation he knows is coming. When David Aaronovitch smarmily remarks, one Oxbridge-educated staff journalist to another, ‘here we are, having our elite discussion,’ Jones tells the reader: ‘Some will claim that I am, myself, a member of the establishment. But it is not someone’s ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... then, in the early Seventies, two things occurred which made the spark jump: I read Iain Crichton Smith’s translations, Poems to Eimhir, and I heard MacLean himself read his own poems in the original Gaelic. To take the translations first, since they were my first exposure: opening the book was like opening the door on a morning of sea-filled ...”

“... his escapades in interior-decoration – he turned his apartment in the family’s London house in Smith Square into ‘The Silver Room’, furnishing it with silver-foil wall-coverings, silver-topped tables, silver satin curtains and a polar bearskin rug or two – and then because of his eye-catching appearance, his jewels and magenta lipstick and ...”

“... for it is all that remains of the unpublished work. Carson McCullers was born Lula Carson Smith in Columbus, Georgia in 1917. She married at the age of 19, divorced, and some turbulent years later remarried the charming, handsome, emotionally unstable and fatally alcoholic bisexual, Reeves McCullers, who committed suicide in 1953, having failed to ...”

“... fearfully good-looking and I fancy I see a resemblance between him and the rabbit boy’s brother David, once a very naughty schoolboy, but now, I believe, a historian of art patronage in the 17th century at Edinburgh University. I have come to put a question to the Minister about W.H. Smith and its dominance in the ...”

“... determined to conserve the land of Britain against the assaults of oil magnates and Mr Buchanan-Smith, the Minister for Energy. (This January he has also twice denounced Macmillan for being soft on Russia: the only politician he has praised is his old favourite, Powell.) The column has a repertory company of fantasy figures – most of them mean, stupid and ...”

“... blood purges of the 1930s and the political infighting that accompanied his rise to power. Hedrick Smith, in his book The Russians described Medvedev as ‘a carefully calibrated nonconformist’, implying that he trimmed his sails to the wind. The conclusion suggested by a comparison between Let history judge and Khrushchev is rather different. The ...”

“... that a positive Greiss test had only one meaning: contact with nitroglycerine. Since the trial, Mr David Bal-dock, former head of the Home Office forensic laboratories at Nottingham, carried out exactly the same test on a series of quite different substances – on nitrocellulose lacquer, for instance, on nitrocellulose chips and nitrocellulose aerosol ...”

“... Elton leafing through A la Carte as a substitute for actual cooking, and Emma consulting Elizabeth David for instruction in the matter of marrow-bones. Wherever the daily human comedy of manners is deployed as a cloak for our brute, indispensable appetites and satisfactions, food and drink must be present or, if absent, must expect to have their absence ...”

“... in 1988, he was a spent force. Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only watch as first John Smith and then Blair and Gordon Brown modernised the Party. That they did so from Millbank Tower, built on the site of the house in which Benn was born, added pathos to the triumph of New Labour over old. The fate of the Bennite Left under New Labour underlines ...”

“... and there is even a computer game in which you can play at bashing the British at Canton. Wasn’t David Cameron aware of all this when he arrived in Beijing in November 2010 wearing a Remembrance Day poppy in his buttonhole? Or the right-wing press, when it heaped praise on him for allegedly refusing to remove it when the Chinese asked him? That will have ...”

“... He depicts himself aimlessly wandering through town from chip shop to toyshop to W.H. Smith (where he was once falsely accused of shoplifting). Lists can keep you company. The young Meades liked pointing out mistakes in grammar and ‘factual inaccuracies’. He was beginning to cotton on to adults’ ‘dissemblance of their ignorance, their ...”

“... Maschler’s achievements as a general trade publisher rank him with Archibald Constable, George Smith, John Blackwood, George Routledge, Frederick Macmillan, David Garnett, Ian Parsons, Allen Lane. It was one of the most highly regarded of today’s younger publishers, Peter Straus (now an agent), who commissioned the ...”