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“... with dusters. I don’t mean I want to play Burt Reynolds parts, only somewhere between him and Richard Wattis, say – those are the parameters.’She was a great woman, her performance of ‘Let’s Do It’ at the Albert Hall the stuff of legend. I just hope Noël Coward was still around to see it. I first met her, almost epically, in Sainsbury’s in ...”

“... a constellation of needs that are dealt with in straight society outside the arena of sex,’ Richard Goldstein argued in the Village Voice in 1983. ‘For gay men, sex, that most powerful implement of attachment and arousal, is also an agent of communion, replacing an often hostile family and even shaping politics. It represents an ecstatic break with ...”

“... privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price. But there is also the feeling that all the ‘civilised world’ (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of ‘terrorism’ and its refusal ...”

“... an icefield so it could set a transatlantic record that would push up his company’s share price, allowing him and his friends on the boat to profit by selling the shares. The hero is the German first officer, Petersen, who resists Ismay and then works selflessly to save the passengers, jumping into the icy water with a baby in his arms after failing ...”

“... is not inevitable: people persist in making judgments in the face of opposed appearances. The price of making it inevitable, I am afraid, is to build all the relevant normative standards into ‘recognition’ in the first place (‘If you really understand the premises ...’). This is to think that recognition involves, from the Sceptic’s own point of ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... poor communities’. During the First World War the summer traffic more or less vanished and the price of fuel – steam coal was badly needed by the Royal Navy – rose steeply: facing large losses, the company begged for more money ‘otherwise the Mail services will automatically cease’. Soon there was talk of a government takeover, which was eventually ...”

“... and if as a result guilty people sometimes walk free, it is not necessarily an excessive price to pay for trying to ensure that people are not convicted unless a fair trial has made a jury sure of their guilt. The great unresolved truth in any criminal trial, whatever the procedure, is not whether the state has satisfied the jury of the accused’s ...”

“... Lancaster, Audie Murphy, Burgess Meredith, Groucho Marx, Vincente Minnelli, Gregory Peck, Vincent Price, Robert Ryan, Edward G. Robinson, Donna Reed, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Frank Sinatra, Sylvia Sidney, Claire Trevor, Franchot Tone, Walter Wanger, Keenan Wynn, William Wyler, Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, Jerry Wald and Robert Young. Ronald Reagan, a New ...”

“... die. Investors face the spectre of toxic death bonds that reach maturity far later than their price suggests. ‘Death pools’ like the Ghoul Pool and stiffs.com run sweepstakes on which celebrities will peg out in the current year. Would-be punters on stiffs.com are egged on with a ‘newest stiffs’ page (current features: Ray Bradbury, ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... could she be bothered to make more and market them I’m sure they would sell for a substantial price. As it is, it stands on the kitchen table waiting to find its – or her – place. A lovely thing. 31 December. Because some 25 years ago The Madness of King George was nominated for an Oscar, around Christmas we generally get a clutch of DVDs soliciting ...”

“... A16. It was a big project for a middling town, with a lot of money riding on it. If the average price of the houses reached £200,000, they alone would be worth £100 million. But consent wasn’t a given. The Environment Agency was bound to be uneasy about the below-high-tide location, regardless of the sea wall. Even though the council was only able to ...”

“... Though he served the lyric stage conscientiously, Hofmannsthal also found in his partnership with Richard Strauss release from an artistic impasse of the kind described in his Letter to Lord Chandos: instead of being constrained to devise drama that was like ‘a tone-poem lacking music’, he now had music itself at his disposal. Auden may have ordered ...”

“... the fact that nearly two-thirds of those who consulted the 17th-century astrological physician Richard Napier for treatment of their mopish or melancholic moods were women, one must set the observation that, as best one can judge from the admittedly defective data, men greatly outnumbered women among the inmates of 18th and early 19th-century madhouses. It ...”