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“... the club, or the pub, or at some crappy dinner party? On the face of it, no thank you. The faint hope might have been that, in writing directly about himself, the irascible old shag would come over as somewhat, shall we say, cuddlier than his usual public image makes him seem. To any such tender expectations, though, Amis offers here a close-to-gleeful ‘In ...”

“... the mayor. Lindbergh was 25. Two years later he married Anne Morrow, and on 1 March 1932 their son Charles Augustus junior was kidnapped from their home near Hopewell, New Jersey. Three months after that, the baby was found murdered in nearby woods. In early 1935, at the ‘trial of the century’ at Flemington, New Jersey, Lindbergh took the stand to give ...”

“... The failure of the Council’s literature policies cannot be attributed to popular opinion. Since Charles Osborne was for a long time the director of the Literature Department, we might expect to find the true explanation of its demise in his memoirs, the first fruits of his leisure in early retirement.† There is an odd devil in Mr Osborne which is always ...”

“... of her parents’ choice and given her envoi with an illegal but obligatory dowry which she must hope will be big enough to keep her in-laws satisfied long enough for her to produce a son. If she fails in both these respects and has fallen among particularly primitive folk she might feature in one of those sad little paragraphs in my morning newspaper ...”

“... at the end of each year, begins, politely and a bit tentatively, in March 1958: ‘Dear Guy, I hope subsequent activities haven’t yet sufficed to obliterate our Boston dinner last fall from your memory.’ The two had crossed paths five years earlier, when they both gave papers on Pound at Columbia, and met again for dinner in 1957. Kenner was writing ...”

“... great swathes of enemy countryside, and some men served as mercenaries and adventurers in the hope of plunder – farm labourers and yeomen, unused to the realities of war, could easily panic under fire, and desertion and mutiny were common. In 1523 one body of troops in an English army chanted ‘Home, Home’ while another chanted in ...”

“... received £1000 from that account, as did Bottomley’s horse trainer. Bottomley gave £1100 to Charles Palmer, who had been deputy editor of John Bull and who won an unexpected by-election victory in 1920 with Bottomley’s backing; a further £4800 went to an actress called Peggy Primrose, one of Bottomley’s longer-standing mistresses. Payments ...”

“... camera crew for a floor she’d cracked herself, for example, and regularly stiffing the couturier Charles James, even as she was politically generous and admirable, donating her time and efforts to an endless parade of left-wing causes. Gypsy’s most famous act was called ‘A Stripteaser’s Education’. In it, she would undress while saying ‘I’m ...”

“... fast piling up against her, Rudd was quick to turn King’s evidence against the Perreaus in the hope of avoiding prosecution. If this twist was predictable, the next one was not. In an unprecedented and controversial step, the judges in the brothers’ trial decided to strip Rudd of her protection as a Crown witness and commit her to separate judicial ...”

“... that dissenting judgments seem to be rarer in the Court of Appeal, where at least they carry the hope of being upheld on a further appeal, than in the House of Lords, where – barring an expedition to the courts in Luxembourg or Strasbourg – dissents go nowhere. I know of no ideal model. The EU’s supreme court, the European Court of Justice in ...”

“... off a power struggle that temporarily paralysed Russian political institutions. Three days later, Charles VI, Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of the complex Habsburg realm, unexpectedly succumbed to food poisoning. Charles’s heir was his 23-year-old daughter, Maria Theresa, who, Blanning writes, described herself as having ...”

“... largest party in the European Parliament is supposed to be appointed head of the commission. Like Charles Michel, the Belgian head of the council, she was chosen because of her subservience to the Franco-German alliance.Still, von der Leyen’s position has been near impossible. Had the commission engaged in unashamed vaccine protectionism by prohibiting ...”

“... of me to anticipate Fenton’s approach to Anthony Julius’s compelling study, but I would hope that he will not see fit to mount another repudiation of this brilliant, passionately concentrated ‘adversarial reading’ of Eliot’s work. I say ‘another repudiation’ advisedly, because Julius’s book was rejected by Oxford University Press on the ...”

“... Nelson Mandela was instrumental to the political bargain that proposed forgiveness in the hope of a better future. Whatever we think of South Africa now, we still contemplate with horror the abyss into which it was widely expected to plunge twenty years ago. How far have things really moved on? Will the historic compromise hold or has the country been ...”

“... affection’ for the Bourbon monarchy: he later confessed to weeping at the sight of Charles X being forced out of Versailles. But professional ambition led him to swear an oath of allegiance to the new constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe d’Orléans. When asked to choose a side, Tocqueville, not for the last time, preferred to maintain an ...”