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“... Secret service memoirs are invariably rubbished. When Robert Anderson’s Lighter Side of My Official Life appeared in 1910 – Anderson had headed a counter-Fenian agency – Winston Churchill lambasted it in the House of Commons for its ‘gross boastfulness’: ‘It is written, if I may say so, in the style of “How Bill Adams Won the Battle of Waterloo” ...”

“... lowest public profile. (How many spy novels can you think of that feature ‘sigint’, aside from Robert Harris’s Enigma?) Yet today it is probably the most important, and certainly the most expensive. It is housed in Cheltenham in ‘the largest building ever initiated by the British government’. The building is shaped like a doughnut, which is the ...”

“... Regard it, if you like, as a ripping anthology of runaway rigmaroles, from Tertullian to Cole Porter, with the added bonus of a brilliant introductory essay; or approach it more soberly, as a donnish disquisition supported by a considerable appendix of illustrative material. I suspect Mr Spufford would like us to take it both ways, and I should therefore ...”

“... him carrying ‘a swordstick with him’ – like a Mr Hyde escaped from Dr Jekyll’s lab. Peter Porter, who admired Redgrove’s talent hugely and came to know him through the poets in Hobsbaum’s Group in 1950s London, told anecdotes of him mixing Merrydown and Benzedrine. Redgrove resorted to this supercharged cocktail when working, like his father but ...”

“... and murder. A vivid account of life for a foreigner under the occupation has appeared in Jadranka Porter’s Under Siege in Kuwait. Ms Porter was a Yugoslav (and a British citizen) employed by the local English-language paper and living with her much older black American boy-friend. Fortunately for the book, this rather ...”

“... endeavour that smacks of artifice, Welty was self-made, something which delighted Katherine Anne Porter. ‘She has never studied the writing craft in any college. She has never belonged to a literary group ... Nothing else that I know about her could be more satisfactory to me than this.’ Despite Welty’s prompt adoption by ...”

“... in a school-yard, remembering taunts of long ago. (One of his cleverest poems, ‘Quintets for Robert Morley’, is a tribute to the skills, social, psychological and physical, developed by the world’s heavyweights.) At school, works by Australian writers disappeared from the curriculum once senior classes were reached and the study became ...”

“... which has now appeared, abridged and translated, as Knut Hamsun: Dreamer and Dissenter; and Robert Ferguson’s Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun (1987). Žagar’s assessment doesn’t seem fair to Ferguson and Kolloen (unless the latter’s original version differs substantially from this one), neither of whom pulls many punches, though she aims a few ...”

“... book at a fair price has taken eight years to cross the Atlantic.) Mr Olney, like but unlike Robert Carrier, is an American who has exported himself to countries where there is no damned nonsense about democracy in matters cultural. He is a cook and a teacher of cookery who commutes between Provence and London, and he takes his craft with intense ...”

“... of the popularity of Burton ale, a visiting cleric claims he has ‘never tasted English beer and porter in greater abundance’. We even hear about the subscription ball, where Country Boamkin, as they call Country Bumkin, is a very favourite dance, tho’ they make it quite different from the dance so called in England. The supper is very elegant, but so ...”

“... the 354 acknowledged bastards of Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, Roy Porter paints a picture of universal libertinism in the 18th century, much of it ‘under the aegis of a benevolent Nature’, which raises as many questions as it makes statements. Some of the claims for unfettered fornication – a Scottish minister maintained ...”

“... the end of a hallway lined with untidy stacks of case notes in wrinkled cardboard folders Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He fixed me with an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they ...”

“... successful abroad is that they shall give a leg up to their fellow-countrymen. A few do so; Peter Porter has been most generous, and Clive James has come to the task more recently, but also with generosity. In this vivacious and often sumptuous new collection of his essays, he has a great deal to say in praise of fellow expatriates, and some magnanimous ...”

“... hands privately. I thought this was common knowledge but in Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class Robert Lacey assures us that there had never been a ‘tradition of selling ... classic, museum-quality masterpieces at auction – at Christie’s or anywhere else’ before the end of the First World War, when Sotheby’s and Christie’s became rivals in ...”

“... from New South Wales, both came to a speedy end: one died and the other was shot by a gamekeeper. Robert Cecil is said to have given his parakeet claret. A zebra brought from Ethiopia by the East India Company in 1826 was allowed to make frequent visits to the canteen of the Royal Menagerie to drink ale, of which it was reported to be ‘exceedingly ...”