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“... Professor Duby confines his attention to the main source for William’s life, a poem in Norman French of some twenty thousand lines commissioned by his son and written a few years after William’s death. The personal memoirs of William – for it is as such that he treats the text – are those, otherwise hardly accessible, of the knightly classes ...”

“... in place.Over the next ten years he became a star. He initially worked as a contract player at Howard Hughes’s RKO. (Hughes, a control-freak, had Mitchum’s house bugged: Mitchum, with characteristic contrariness, always insisted he liked Hughes.) His best roles were largely in film noir and dark westerns, the most famous of them Out of the Past and ...”

“... on a rosy apocalyptic glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith ...”

“... was built for Julius Drewe, a tea importer who had persuaded himself that he was descended from a Norman baron called Drogo who had given his name to the nearby parish of Drewsteignton. A literal-minded man, Drewe wanted his house to be a Norman castle. ‘I do wish he didn’t,’ Lutyens wrote, but it was a large and ...”

“... make this film.’ Getting to work on the film, wresting it from the hands of the white director Norman Jewison, persuading Warner Brothers that it needed to be as long as it is, that the scenes of Malcolm’s pilgrimage to Egypt and Mecca had to be shot on location, all this is a version of Malcolm’s struggle on behalf of the blacks; maybe the real ...”

“... of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the assumption that ...”

“... by doing their best to scupper his premiership. (Cameron was working as special adviser to Norman Lamont, the Tory chancellor, on Black Wednesday. ‘If you cut me down the middle,’ he told an interviewer before the last election, ‘you would find “Exchange Rate Mechanism” written on me like a stick of rock.’) The students in the audience ...”

“... border castles and towers. In Northumberland, James awaited the English army, led by Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. Though apparently possessing advantages in ground, equipment and supplies, James allowed himself to be outmanoeuvred by Surrey, who cut off the Scottish army’s route north, forcing it to move to Branxton Hill, where its cannon could not ...”

“... words, citing a characteristic declaration that ‘a bill becomes a law because certain words of Norman French are pronounced in specific circumstances: the same words in other circumstances and synonymous words in the same circumstances would not make law.’ What is being invoked – celebrated – here is a view of allegiance and identity and governance ...”

“... her, when one’s baby-sitter is a cabinet minister one realises one is really old! 21 May 1997. Howard Davies is appointed chairman-designate of ‘SuperSIB’ (or, as it is later christened by Gordon Brown, the Financial Services Authority), as much to his surprise as everyone else’s. He had been on his way to South America in his capacity as deputy ...”

“... beyond doubt is that the fantastic Fayed claims underwritten by Herbert Smith, Kleinwort Benson, Norman Tebbit and Sir Gordon Borrie could have been disproved by a single cub reporter with a telephone. Which reporter was there to make the calls, however? Tiny Rowland naturally ordered the Observer to expose his rivals, and the Observer did so. Not everyone ...”

“... with the grossly unreconstructed interventions at the recent Conservative Party Conference by Norman Tebbit. Although most of his major works are out of print, Carlyle’s letters, and those of his wife Jane, are in the process of being edited and published. It is a massive task, but they are among the finest literary letters of the century and the ...”

“... were older than the kingdom of England itself, but a large proportion testified to pious Anglo-Norman energy after William I’s conquest of England in 1066, resulting in the formation of a diverse range of communities whose distinctive ‘rules’ for communal life were an implied criticism of the monasteries that had gone before. Well-functioning ...”

“... short volume is not so much a biography of Crossman – that is to be provided by Anthony Howard – as a portrait of someone he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere friendship. Faithfully, he ...”

“... comes up all over the place. Even in élite platoons some sections are better than others. Michael Howard (‘Churchill and the First World War’), F.H. Hinsley (... and the Use of Special Intelligence), R.V. Jones, the happy beam-hunter of 1940 and premier intelligencer thereafter (... and Science), Norman Rose (and ...”