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“... of her illusions about life in the former colonial seat (Nigeria had gained independence from Britain just two years earlier, in 1960). Joining Onwordi in London, she found that her marriage was dead on arrival, notwithstanding the conception of another son on their first night together. Onwordi, who hadn’t yet passed his accountancy exams, had spent ...”

“... Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in remote lands and stirring encounters with alien peoples, without necessarily unsettling loyalty to the values of the Home Counties. The ...”

“... be wrong about that. As Thatcherism was succeeded by Blairism, he sometimes wrote bitterly about Britain’s ‘dishonoured public life’; perhaps the idea of a clean slate in the North might have appealed to him. More recently, he was aware that Scotland had changed and matured in new ways. But, to be honest, it’s more likely that he stayed in tune with ...”

“... on the wheel’. It’s rare for the now deified AD (‘probably the most intelligent detective in Britain’) to suffer public transport. He did let the train take the strain once, but that was strategic, so that he could, like John Major, boast of how he had ‘settled down to re-read Trollope’s The Way We Live Now’. Re-read! Potboilers are ...”

“... was crippled by polio, Hillary was disfigured by appalling burns received during the Battle of Britain, Wolfenden developed eye trouble during National Service). They came from provincial middle-class homes, their mothers beloved and doting, their fathers withdrawn professional men. Each in some way willed or brought about his own death: Wood threw himself ...”

“... Britain’s two leading campus novelists have long broken out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically ...”

“... is the role of external broadcasting after 1945: was this an impartial news service or an arm of Britain’s soft diplomacy? During the Cold War, the Foreign Office funded and set the guidelines for the European Service’s broadcasting, while the BBC was supposed to have editorial control over content – an arrangement almost designed to cause friction. As ...”

“... American white power internationalism and American anti-communism dramatically converged. In 1965, Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence from Britain, emboldened by support from across the US political establishment, from Dean Acheson to Bob Dole. When Reagan, as a presidential ...”

“... a certain sort of play. At least two artistic directors of the Royal Court (Lindsay Anderson and Ian Rickson, the present incumbent) have marked Look Back in Anger commemorations by reading out the West End listings of May 1956, which include a version of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but largely consist of forgotten country-house ...”

“... victory in 1936 ‘carried with it the seeds of hubris’. I was reminded of a passage in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler: ‘Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable. The point where nemesis takes over had been reached by 1936.’ The parallel is striking. The Führer’s spectacular success in reclaiming the ...”

“... Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer ...”

“... and critical work, and many readers have returned a negative answer to the question that Ian Parsons, his publisher at Chatto, posed after reading the typescript of an early novel: ‘Is Williams really a novelist?’ Smith makes it plain that Williams thought of himself as primarily ‘a writer’: ‘Between 1948 and 1955 he worked at six separate ...”

“... Garfield interviewed him in 1993, for his superb (and predictably out-of-print) book on Aids in Britain, The End of Innocence: Derek Jarman says he feels like an eighty-year-old man, not only old, but lonely, missing all his friends. Walking along Charing Cross Road towards Chinatown he holds a thin brown stick, too short for his needs … His new haircut ...”

“... those who write or speak recklessly.An echo of the aesthetic defence of Rushdie could be heard in Ian McEwan’s retrospective comment on the affair in the Guardian on 14 September 2012: ‘it seemed like the social glue of multiculturalism was melting away. We were coming apart, and doing it over a postmodern multi-layered satirical novel.’ What work is ...”

“... Charles Saatchi took the podium at the Tate Gallery. It was a very rare public appearance by Britain’s leading private collector of contemporary art. His words were awaited with interest. Since it opened to the public in 1985, the Saatchi collection in St John’s Wood has become a focus of what’s called the contemporary art debate. With every ...”