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“... No Enemies of Promise here as for his half-hated friend Connolly. If Waugh had seen a pram in his hall, he would probably have been mortified; his reaction as a writer when his wife had babies was to go away and put up in a hotel where he could write in peace. Many novelists, like Anthony Powell, found that they could not get down to work while hostilities ...”

“... an unspoken obligation to talk personally. Plomley became part of the furniture. There’s William Trevor ruminating unshowily on the job of writing; the just pre-Pennies from Heaven Dennis Potter remembering his Forest of Dean childhood; and Charlotte Rampling, very solemn, on the death of her sister and making The Night Porter – Plomley managing to avoid ...”

“... my life.’ Cornwell agreed to co-operate with Sisman after reading his last book, a Life of Hugh Trevor-Roper. In an intriguingly cagey introduction, Sisman describes the resulting deal. Cornwell would give him long interviews, access to his archives, and a list of introductions. ‘I was to have a free hand to write what I wanted, provided that I showed ...”

“... is no tidy box of historical explanation into which we can put him. The brisk judgment of Hugh Trevor-Roper was that Cromwell ‘was a freak in English history’. It has always been easier to fall back on broad-brush assertions or to dismiss him with an adjective: ‘sinister’ and ‘Machiavellian’ used to be two of the most common. As Geoffrey Elton ...”

“... must have started back in alarm on seeing a letter addressed in Godwin’s hand waiting on the hall table, and deferred opening it until they had steadied their nerves with a glass of something. For among the various kinds of letter included in this volume, invitations, thank-you letters, discussions of politics and theology, those that most stand out are ...”

“... first. On 4 February 1658, seven months before his death, he arrived unannounced at Westminster Hall in a hackney carriage – the Thames was icebound – and told his startled son-in-law, Charles Fleetwood, that he intended to dissolve Parliament. Think hard about it first, Fleetwood pleaded, for it is a decision of great consequence. ‘You are a ...”

“... any friends. She can dance, but nobody asks her:I smiled, and hummed, and stood carelessly as the hall emptied into the ballroom and I waited, only for Uncle Ulick. Presently I took myself to the ladies’ cloakroom, the classic refuge of the unwanted. I hurried downstairs again, hoping that I looked as if I were keeping a partner waiting. I stood ...”

“... Channon’s account of his and others’ sex lives is jaw-dropping. In 1956, he went to Holkham Hall in Norfolk for the wedding of Lady Anne Coke to Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner. In her recent memoir, Lady in Waiting, Anne Glenconner describes her husband’s sexual proclivities, but also says that in those days girls of her class couldn’t ...”

“... it represented had run out of steam. Much more typical for that tradition was the fate of Trevor Griffiths’s 1997 film about Aneurin Bevan, Food for Ravens, shown untrailed on BBC2 at 11.15 p.m. on a November Sunday. The self-fulfilling prophecy that Ravens was ‘only a three-million player’ was echoed when a hapless BBC spokesperson had to ...”