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“... degenerated from the high point of the 1980s – when, as one former officer tells the journalist Tom Harper in Broken Yard, his book about the Met, ‘people had caravans and boats named after the home secretary’ – into barely concealed mutual contempt in the 2010s. ‘You will not find a police officer now … who would be willing to vote Tory,’ a ...”

“... Joan Collins if she could ‘borrow’ some of her jewellery (Collins refused). She asked a young Tom Cruise for a diamond tennis bracelet (made up of many identical settings), but Cruise didn’t know what she meant and sent some cash instead. Farrell, however, was in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond pendant ...”

“... few of them able to indulge in what he calls ‘the erotics of speaking’. He instances Edith Evans, an odd-looking girl and a shop assistant, who had a notion of herself as a beautiful and talented woman and who made her audience share that vision. And she was not alone: Peggy Ashcroft came from Croydon, Noël Coward from the suburbs and Alec Guinness ...”

“... like Orwell or Woolf, or avowedly scientific monographs by anthropologists such as Firth or Evans-Pritchard. In principle, three types of author were professionally distinguishable – the journalist, the writer, the scholar. In fact, Seton-Watson, most unambiguously a scholar – chairs in history at London and Oxford – made his name as a periodical ...”