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“... of Literacy, like other popular non-fiction books of the time, such as Culture and Society and Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London, was read by most people in the Pelican edition). He became a member of Allen Lane’s brains trust. Hoggart turned to the publisher for funding when he was setting up the Birmingham ...”

“... as a moral career. In the wake of his conviction for murdering and dismembering six lonely young men at that dreaded address, Cranley Gardens, Muswell Hill, Dennis Nilsen must have basked in the thought that, even behind bars, he was still free to roam through the darker corners of the minds of all those people who had scorned or ignored him when he ...”

“... entirely faithful to our memories, it has scarcely changed. It’s true it doesn’t feel quite as young as it did, and that a certain melancholy, always present, murmurs a little more loudly than it used to. Fifty years are not nothing. But think of some of the other films released in 1960: L’Avventura, Butterfield 8, La Dolce Vita, Elmer Gantry, The ...”

“... far from slags. They’re not crippled – hopeful and giving still. No bitterness lurks in their young breasts adorned with such taste (Like the mums in a serial ad – a pair but not shoved in your face). The four enter a bar like exotic birds briefly alighting on country streams. Which table’s the problem. To see and be seen yet repel the dull ...”

“... war as brutal reality. Brook says his engagement with The Mahabharata began in 1966, when a young Indian came into the rehearsal room for US, Brook’s show about the war in Vietnam, and recounted to the company this scene of the Bhagavad-Gita. US was threaded through with self-immolating Buddhist monks and their Arjuna-like Western ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was incidental, part of some larger story that wasn’t ...”

“... a career in it, but he never underestimated the morbidity of children. To his future in-laws as a young man he ‘lacked innocence’. (Strange requirement: innocence of the young!) To my mother he proposed an association against marriage. Later he proposed. It was Chekhov who said where there are too many cures the patient ...”

“... train and in charge not only of this treasure but of a gang boss’s son. They have rescued the young man from a kidnapping, and what’s in the case is the unpaid ransom. Within minutes of the train leaving Tokyo, they have lost the case and the son is dead, so they are out of a job, or rather the only job left to them is … staying alive. They are a ...”

“... A Long Finish, to the wine and truffle country of the Piemonte, the sue tragicomic adventures of Michael Dibdin’s Venetian-born ‘supercop’ Aurelio Zen have offered many of the pleasures of tourism. Dibdin, however, skips over Italy’s ancient monuments to concentrate on its kidnappings and financial scams, its wiretapping and wirepulling, charting the ...”

“... of service he outdoes some contemporaries by decades. Before many people had heard of either Michael Heseltine or Geoffrey Howe, they were juniors to Cabinet mogul Walker, first at Environment and then at Trade and Industry. Walker still insists that Heath never deserved to lose, and believes Heath’s style of politics, a Toryism he represents as both ...”

“... year it is hard to accept these ‘sudden’ appearances. Only last December the anthropologist Michael Day wrote an article in Nature entitled ‘Lucy jilted’, showing that the date suggested for her may be wrong by 400,000 years. The authors are serious scientists who would probably admit these difficulties, but like other anthropologists before them ...”

“... stories. The collection finishes with a sudden awareness of age. Ironically, she who had been young when youth was ‘practically a felony’ finds herself old when youth has usurped all privilege. The fact is not particularly resented: ‘it would serve only a maudlin purpose to question a way of life which, at the most liberal estimate, is ...”

“... and the stakes were high. Vincent Hickey named his accomplices at Chapel Farm: his cousin Michael Hickey, aged 16 but already an experienced minor criminal, and Jimmy Robinson, a man in his mid-forties with a mixed career of regular work and crime whose letters from prison, quoted by Foot, show intelligence and a powerful way with words. For good ...”

“... Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into words,’ recorded Dalton, who had been in love with him for years. Dalton was not the only one: Crosland’s grace, charm and ...”

“... occasional murdered foreign student, but not too many. Where the walls are scarred with YMD (for Young Mental Drylaw), and the streets on Fridays are blustery with witty drunks, and beautiful grant-maintained schoolgirls tuck into beastly food with savage appetites. I want to have wooden shutters and specimen plants, Georgian casements (the only artefact ...”