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“... nothing to do with. Despite his hard-won mathematical competence, Hamilton was most at home in the field. I spent time with him in the rainforests of the Far East and was taken aback at first by his boyish exuberance. Every time I turned round, he would be climbing a tree, wading up an inviting river, or digging into a fallen tree with his penknife. The ...”

“... Sands, unravelled German plans for the invasion of England. Within a few months, Le Queux had got Field-Marshal Lord Roberts and Harmsworth to believe there were 50,000 German waiters spying in London. No, 80,000 German soldiers, said Roberts, employed mostly on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King ...”

“... Andrew Crozier has lately written an exceptionally searching essay about British poetry since 1945,* in which Norman MacCaig is named just once in passing. There is nothing wrong with that; Crozier isn’t attempting one of those limp ‘surveys’ in which everyone who deserves mention gets it. All the same I have the impression that a nod in passing – usually, it’s true, complimentary – is the most that MacCaig normally gets from any of us ...”

“... rise to an executive level where they only boss around those who write – and particularly about Andrew Knight, the former Economist editor brought in as chief executive of the Telegraph by Conrad Black. Part of the deal was that Hastings should replace Deedes as editor, a changing of the guard that led Thatcher to throw a party for him at Number Ten. Knight ...”

“... five of which I spent going up in an aeroplane, an old Moth, which flipped once or twice round a field. It’s an odd thing that though I can remember things from World War One – German prisoners being marched through the streets, biplanes practising looping the loop, and that heart-stopping “falling leaf” descent – I have no recollection whatever of ...”

“... calling for an international audit panel to assess the potential benefits and risks of a field trial with the slugs. A sympathetic official at the Ministry succeeded in having the request submitted to unspecified ‘European authorities’, but the proposal then foundered: the Ministry wasn’t prepared to finance the air fares of the two ...”

“... Secret Service: Sir Francis Walsingham ran it for Elizabeth I.) Today the hounds are in pursuit of Andrew Gow, the Classical scholar and art collector who was Blunt’s mentor at Trinity. Gow, who had taught at Eton, devoted part of his life to editing Nicander, a didactic Greek poet who wrote poems on snake-bites, poisons and their remedies – there is ...”

“... and, in retrospect, boring and pointless: all that matters is that the management and our editor, Andrew Neil, told us nothing of their true intentions. By contrast, the crisis itself was simple. Rupert Murdoch demanded a level of compulsory redundancies of his Sogat 82 and NGA employees that he knew they would not accept. The two unions took the bait and on ...”

“... deceit. ‘I don’t know how I can demonstrate my remorse,’ Glass is reported to have said to Andrew Sullivan, the editor who hired him. Sullivan pointed out, not in so many words, that taking a giant book advance and allowing a film to be made from the story of your misdemeanours might not be the subtlest demonstration of remorse. Next came Jayson Blair ...”

“... by coursing, a rural blood-sport (still going), in which greyhounds chase a live hare over an open field. For the Irish, coursing is a gambling game; for the English, it’s all for the fun of the chase, the thrill of the kill. Laura Thompson jumps on this point in order to take the first of many boring swipes at what used to be called the upper orders. In ...”

“... I expected nothing from abroad . . . The emergence of India as a self-reliant country in the field of guided missiles upset all the developed nations of the world, but innovation cannot be suppressed by international restrictions . . . On the night of 15 January 1991, the Gulf War broke out between Iraq and the Allied Forces led by the USA. In one ...”

“... march as experienced by generals, privates and prisoners of war; slave owners, house slaves and field hands; doctors and nurses; reporters and photographers; priests, nuns and French chefs. For Doctorow, the march is too overwhelming to be comprehended as a whole. As the 60,000 soldiers approach, one character senses a pressure that ‘had a murmur to ...”

“... 19th century the surprise stop is at Nietzsche, who, Forty persuades us, saw space ‘as a force field, generated by the dynamism of bodily movement’. Semper is bypassed for the moment. Then come the heavily populated 1890s, when three authors, Hildebrand, Lipps and Schmarsow, simultaneously press their own readings of Raum as fundamental categories of ...”

“... The editors of the Field Day Anthology make large claims for its importance as ‘the most comprehensive anthology of Irish writing ever published’. These three volumes, totalling over four thousand pages and spanning a historical period of fifteen hundred years, bring into print an impressive range and variety of writings from a number of languages, periods and genres, and their publication is a major event in Irish studies ...”

“... which had terrorised Northern settlers and sacked the town of Lawrence, but ridiculed Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina in unusually personal terms, alluding to his speech impediment. ‘He shows an incapacity of accuracy,’ Sumner declared. ‘He cannot open his mouth, but out there flies a blunder.’ Brooks was Butler’s second cousin ...”