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“... estimate of the size of the German bomber force in the west was much too high – Peter Gray Lucas refers to this as the ‘St Ives story’ (‘As I was going to St Ives, I met a man with seven wives’). But to get a better estimate it was necessary to know which aircraft belonged to which unit, which was difficult because the call-signs ...”

“... for succession to the FBI directorship. Nixon appointed a loyal colleague and FBI outsider, Pat Gray, as acting director, but the post needed Senate confirmation, and Gray’s subordinates conspired against him. In 2005 it was revealed that Woodward and Bernstein’s source, Deep Throat, was Mark Felt, a Hoover loyalist ...”

“... Kenneth Gray Mdala was born around 1880 in what was later to become Nyasaland and is now Malawi. It is that part of Africa through which Livingstone trod or was carried, defined for strangers by its long, thin lake lying in the Rift Valley and by the ravages of the slave trade. Mdala came from a chiefly family and belonged to an ethnic group known as the Yao, who were one of the agents of that trade ...”

“... crammed with photographs, illustrations and comic strips, compiled and annotated by Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was ...”

“... of holding forth. From this dinner, there resulted the following year Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle’s Sign of the Four. Conan Doyle wrote a polite fan letter to Wilde, who wrote an effusive ‘thank you’ back. That seems to be the total extent of their correspondence. Conan Doyle mentions only one further meeting. Just after the opening ...”

“... Butterflyes Ball John Dame Trott and her Cat William Mother Hubard and her Dog Sophy House that Jack Built The Reform Bill of 1832 achieved nothing for the rural poor and riots in the countryside were brutally suppressed by executions, imprisonment and transportations. The Clares’ financial difficulties were symptomatic of a widespread economic ...”

“... I liked it. Fortunately, it turned out to be one of the brands acceptable to Bruno. If you ordered Jack Daniel’s, for instance, Bruno would tell you that you were more or less a fool, in thrall to Madison Avenue. Tanqueray gin and Chivas Regal also earned you a rough ride. But Old Grand-Dad was jake with Bruno, a good, unfashionable whiskey. So it was my ...”

“... was naturally blond, about five feet 11 in height, slender, weighing about 145 pounds with gray-blue eyes, pale flawless skin, a Norse skull, Latin lips and straight narrow nose’ – a description that smacks both of the mortuary slab and (more appropriately) a ‘Wanted’ poster. In April 1939, Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice gave a reading at the ...”

“... on the bus too, and the man at the wheel was Neal Cassady, the legendary long-distance driver of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Stone was part of the Perry Lane crowd, but when the hijinks began to eat into his writing time he slipped away. Kesey’s voyage east with the Merry Pranksters was one of the signature moments of the decade, along with Altamont and ...”

“... House had been dictated by Roth’s Connecticut neighbour and flouncy nemesis Francine du Plessix Gray – ‘Francine Duplicitous Gray’, as Roth called her. Interviewing may not have been Miller’s forte but what was his forte? He made such a skimpy mess of the Notes on the Text for Volume Three of Roth’s Library of ...”

“... was black. Gates submitted it for examination to, among others, the expert who had exposed the ‘Jack the Ripper Diaries’ as a fraud. The issue of authentication was vital, and went beyond the nature of the artefact itself. Granted that the paper, ink and other external markers dated it to somewhere between 1855 and 1860, and given that the ...”

“... been marked by several new approaches to the reign that gave us the King James Bible, the Union Jack and Bonfire Night. ‘Four centuries is too long for anyone to remain in rehab,’ Clare Jackson writes in The Mirror of Great Britain. She sets out ‘neither to valorise nor to denigrate’ her subject, ‘but rather to restore appreciation of the sheer ...”

“... was to eschew a patriotism that was other than British, or a flag that was other than the Union Jack,’ he writes. He does not discuss the more obvious and recent loss: the experience of sudden, precipitous state withdrawal that England’s industrialised regions shared with equivalent parts of Scotland. The different electoral responses of England and ...”

“... the avant-garde. As a heavyweight boxer, his career peaked in 1916, when he fought the formidable Jack Johnson in Barcelona. He lasted six rounds. These two strands of Cravan’s career are not as diverse as one might think: his stance as a writer was extremely combative – confrontation and ‘anti-art’ polemic were his métier. As the poet Mina Loy, who ...”

“... and, in effect, redesigned. In Tal’s own words, the machine ‘is always young, like Dorian Gray’. In the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars Israeli air power and tank power were combined strategically with shattering effect on the Egyptian Forces, and tank officers were able to act with a surprising degree of local initiative. The Israeli victory in ...”