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“... are also more than usually absurd. Look at those silly clips of Paddy Ashdown playing hopscotch or John Major on his knees in a day-nursery or Tony Blair in his Newcastle soccer-strip. Who do these people think they’re fooling? Why don’t they treat us as grown-ups? What’s happened to the issues? To this, the politicians might retort: where did those ...”

“... Powell is 92 this year. He has written 19 novels, four volumes of memoirs, one sort of biography (John Aubrey and His Friends), three plays, two books of collected literary criticism, and now, with the arrival of Journals 1990-92, three volumes of diaries. The D&O is there from the first words of his first novel, Afternoon Men, published 65 years ...”

“... a used Johnnie,’ she added – this being the name by which former members of St John’s College, Oxford, refer to themselves. We knew that because both of us were also, to use the posh term, Johnians. The LRB asked Blair to write a piece, and he did. Its left-is-best vibe makes entertaining reading now, but it’s well written and at least ...”

“... these other voyagers more precise. In autumn 1771, the Admiralty began planning a new voyage under Cook’s leadership to the Pacific. In the search for naturalists and astronomers to accompany the expedition, Priestley, then a minister in Leeds and a well-known natural philosopher, was offered a berth. He enthusiastically accepted. Priestley had already ...”

“... really go to The Last Laugh, the 1959 Cambridge Footlights revue, directed and largely devised by John Bird. CND was just beginning to gather momentum and the show opened with a huge nuclear explosion, following which, in the words of the producer William Donaldson, the audience was treated to a whole evening’s worth of ‘terrible gloomy stuff – the ...”

“... obituary, in the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society, of Sir William Cook, scientific director of the Grapple test series; some recent disclosures on the part of John Ward, who was employed at the British nuclear weapons laboratory at Aldermaston for six months during 1955; and a group of ...”

“... Belle Ferronnière, Virgin and Child with St Anne, the first version of Virgin of the Rocks and St John the Baptist. A new insight into his activity was provided by the publication in 1651 of his so-called Treatise on Painting, a work produced after his death by combining different passages from his notebooks. Largely thanks to his fame the text was frequently ...”

“... peglegs: all press-ganged upstream with Adam Dalgleish’s impersonator, Roy Marsden, for the Long John Silver show at the Mermaid. James is left with a heritage trail of selective quotations, a London Dungeon of waxwork crimes exhibited in authentic locations. This is an empty set, a set defined by its architecture (where even Mandy the Temp, in her ...”

“... Social Chapter, followed by the restoration of the Civil Service unions to GCHQ. Then came Robin Cook’s declaration in favour of a landmine ban – achieved by the simple, but effective, technique of failing to inform the Ministry of Defence in advance. Then there was the cancellation of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by ...”

“... name is Glasse discovers his métier by the camp fire and is assured by his mentor that ‘a good cook, even on Board of Trade allowance, has brought many a ship to port that ‘ud otherwise ’ave mut’nied on the’igh seas.’ For a hundred and fifty years, ever since the best jobs in London kitchens began going to Frenchmen and later Italians, the ...”

“... ability to see faces enables us to see faces in all sorts of things: this is catalogued in John Michell’s Simulacra (1979), which has 196 illustrations of faces in trees, stones, vegetables and animals. In a visual pun, seeing things in things is incorporated with the game that we play, as we sit at our desks, of lining things up, making that ...”

“... his fellow diners rise as one to watch the passing of the daily freight train – but in general John Rayburn, as he is called by his Southern pals, finds the easygoing amiability of Guntersville’s close-knit community beguilingly comfortable. Rayburn is in search of the Agrarian ideal as formulated by Allen Tate and friends in the early ...”

“... of her man. When her sister Henrietta finally managed to marry her soldier lover Surtees Cook, in the teeth of their father’s antagonism, Elizabeth Barrett was dubious about the results: but as well as being rich, Surtees proved himself a genial and doting husband and father. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth admitted that she had come to feel a ...”

“... in the bush) and tried to stow away on a ship to Britain. By the time he was 21 he had worked as cook in a hamburger bar, helped lead a strike in the hat factory, and married. He wanted to get to Europe, but he was not a competent enough draughtsman to win a scholarship. Sir Keith Murdoch, the newspaper proprietor, offered bursaries, but his advisers also ...”

“... elegant without being a show-off; devoted to the husband without making a display of it; admirable cook, makes all her own clothes? That would be about right. Her radical chic would have been much the same as his, but we might have the impression that it was a more settled part of her life-style and her way of facing society. Both made considerable social ...”