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“... Royal Society some ten years before William Budd, Conan Doyle’s partner in general practice as a young man. A Sherlock became Dean of St Paul’s near the close of the 17th century; there was a Portsmouth cricketer named Sherlock; of a certain Patrick Sherlock, another contemporary of Conan Doyle’s at Stonyhurst, it was declared by authority that he could ...”

“... On page 38 of this book appears one of the most remarkable photographs I have seen. It shows a young mother playing an energetic game (tag, perhaps, or pig-in-the-middle) with her three children, two girls and a boy. There are four lively, happy people in the photograph, but only six arms and six legs, for the two girls share a body ...”

“... wake it up Deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Raine and Amis are of the same generation (young), and of the same university, and their careers in literary journalism have intertwined. They are held to belong to a coterie which has been termed – embarrassingly for them, doubtless – the New Oxford Wits. Given a degree of literary fraternity, there ...”

“... alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are Mozart and Malcolm Muggeridge, and the French sandwich of Arletty and Yvonne Arnaud contains Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The name of Neville Chamberlain seems to set off a nervous ...”

“... times he was impatient with the lack of response of his British ally (he referred to Admiral Sir Dudley Pound as demi-kilo), he showed no basic hostility to the British, and tried hard to establish an effective working relationship with them. During the crisis of May and June 1940 he is depicted as uncertain, envisaging a variety of possibilities, including ...”

“... whether his demise was deliberately accelerated by a doctor. Was it just coincidence that the young man took a dramatic turn for the worse directly after the arrival of the Queen’s physician? Why was he in such agonising pain? Was pneumonia the true cause of his death? To this day there are those who are convinced that poison was administered to Prince ...”

“... lowered, post offices were built, mailboxes were attached to lamp posts and home delivery allowed young women to receive letters without visiting a space full of loungers who were up to no good. Systems didn’t always function smoothly, and dead letters piled up, providing journalists with homely material for columns. But the scale of the enterprise was ...”

“... job. Treachery and self-aggrandisement were part of the natural order of things in what Ruth Dudley Edwards, in this double biography of Cudlipp and King, comically describes as the glory days of Fleet Street. The two men had very little in common. Cudlipp, the youngest son of a travelling salesman, received his formal education in local authority ...”

“... reasons as much as out of ideological conviction. As Henry VII’s former minister Edmund Dudley put it in 1509, in a treatise dedicated to the 18-year-old Henry VIII, war was a ‘right marvellous consumer of treasure and riches’. Counsellors, he said pointedly, should be very careful when advising their sovereign to start a war, for while ‘the ...”

“... Lady Spencer. What should one make of the life and the talent? Hilda, writing to Spencer’s agent Dudley Tooth, said that ‘being with Stanley is like being with a holy person ... for he is the thing so many strive for and he has only to be.’ Never mind the effect, feel the sincerity, is what many admirers say. Certainly there is no doubt about Spencer’s ...”

“... When​ I was young it was possible to feel you’d made it as a writer simply by getting a phone call from one of four editors. When it came to ambition, very few of the writers I knew really gave a fuck about being in Who’s Who, being named an honorary fellow or having one of the queen’s gongs, or a million quid advance ...”

“... or just dead. It’s hard to distinguish between the damage done to the old Frankenstein by Young Frankenstein, to say nothing of The Munsters, and the damage done by time and change on their own. Certainly when Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein’s crippled assistant Fritz, scuttles off down a hill, doubled over his very short walking-stick, it’s hard not ...”

“... state.’ To the reader, it will seem that self-confidence returned pretty fast. Life as a young Scots Greys officer in Westphalia called for the high spirits that go with bruising sports and the release of greased pigs. Tickings-off for Fiennes came from the well-born: from his adjutant, the Duke of Kent (for rifle practice in the bedroom block), and ...”

“... the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law League, insisting that his paper should be an independent voice. Launched in August ...”

“... by the Korean War momentarily turned the population against the government of Senanayake’s son, Dudley, who took refuge with his cabinet on a British battleship docked in Colombo harbour. But the LSSP and other Marxist parties failed to translate the general strike into political results; they were still too deferential to the parliamentary system. With ...”