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“... Thrice has Anthony Burgess begun a novel in bed, with intimations of impropriety and guilt. Getting out of the dreadful thing was the problem posed for the bold bigamist of Beds in the East, the third volume in his Malayan trilogy: ‘Either side of the bed was the wrong side. True it was possible to get out of it by inching slowly forward, on one’s fat brown rump, to the foot; but that, for some reason, often woke both of them ...”

“... by the entry first consulted can be led on a treasure hunt for further clues. Start with Adam Smith and you find a picture and a few key dates in his career. But see Free Trade. Here not only the meaning of the term but also the influence of the policy is suggested. See Richard Cobden. This leads us to the Anti-Corn Law League, and in turn to John ...”

“... by far the most popular whipping-boy, but with minority lobbies also fingering Richard Crossman, Anthony Howard and all the other post-Sixties editors. There is little disagreement, however, about when the glory days began. The New Statesman whose past is so ubiquitously pressed into service for rival versions of its future is the magazine whose identity was ...”

“... Anglocentric: Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is in facing-page English, but Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith, for example, occur only in English, and there is no Welsh-language poetry at all. On the other hand, O’Brien’s selection of English-language poetry casts a wider and more ambitious net. ‘Even as we study it, the map changes and discloses a larger ...”

“... success of Fortunes of War, the 1987 TV version of her two trilogies set in the Second World War (Anthony Burgess, a fan, called them a hexateuch), was the visual sumptuousness: the arrival in Bucharest of the train carrying the young British Council teacher and his new wife; the Athens settings of the wife’s romance with one British officer and her ...”

“... in the home he had chosen for them, and his frustrations grew dark. Recently, when the actor Matt Smith was introduced to Prince William and the prince was told Smith would soon be playing his grandfather in an epic Netflix series, The Crown, William offered only one word. ‘Legend,’ he said, as if they were talking ...”

“... series might be directed at the number of familiar names on the contents page: Barbara Trapido, Anthony Thwaite, Anne Stevenson, Alan Brownjohn, Helen Simpson, Andrew Motion, Michael Hofmann, Alan Sillitoe, Louis de Bernières and Geoff Dyer are ten of them, and ‘new’ isn’t the first word that springs to mind. But there are plenty of good reasons, too ...”

“... Reading the stories themselves, I kept on seeing Elizabeth Jolley as an heir to Stevie Smith, quirkily and slyly keeping an eye on the oddities, vanities and vulnerabilities of human beings, unsettling the grown-ups with perverse but gentle ...”

“... hectically rhetorical, and too often mawkish or twee. The drawings are very much School of Stevie Smith, but even worse than hers, and the lay-out of the book brings to mind those reactionary underground magazines of the Sixties, where clutter and muddle were the major aesthetic aims. The title, Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded ...”

“... of Saladin’ has done the rounds and features in quite a number of popular illustrated books. In Anthony Bridge’s The Crusades the accompanying caption says: ‘This is thought to be a portrait of Saladin by an Egyptian artist of the Fatimid school, perhaps because the man portrayed appears to be blind in one eye, as was Saladin.’ Nice try, but there is ...”

“... security. Mexico, the largest and wealthiest of them, has come closest. Mexico, says Peter Smith, in his chapter in the Cambridge History, ‘stands out as a paragon of political stability within Latin America’. There have been no serious efforts to produce political destabilisation, either from without or from within, since the Revolution of ...”

“... it. Even the man who was to become the most famous of the early English captives in America, John Smith, who had been ‘rescued’ from the Algonquin chief, Powhatan, by his daughter Pocahontas (playing Medea to Smith’s Jason), had first been captured by the Turks and sold as a slave in Istanbul. The continuity of the ...”

“... Labours’. The Old Labour Party which Mr Blair inherited, which we might call the Kinnock-Smith Party, was one variety, and it differed from Tony Benn’s variety as it did from the Wilson-Callaghan variety. That Party in turn differed significantly from Attlee’s, which differed even more from Ramsay MacDonald’s. And so on. We could ...”

“... artifices, promising huge returns and immense repute among their fellows. This is the world Pamela Smith describes in her fine study of the relation between alchemy and commerce in the German-speaking lands of the later 17th century. While Eamon takes a broad, if not long-winded, view of the history of recipes and advice manuals from ancient times to the early ...”

“... advantage. Good-looking and good-natured, eloquent and earnest, well-educated and well-connected, Anthony Wedgwood Benn had the best of both worlds. Father was a radical Liberal MP who switched to Labour in the Twenties and ended up representing the Party in the House of Lords as the first Viscount Stansgate. The family lived at 40 Grosvenor ...”