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Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 1989, 11 January 1990

... some hotel.’ It takes me a time to realise that she is not talking about her treasured copies of Anthony Burgess but her social security books.12 March. Names of the Albanian Football Team.The Interpreter: Ilir Agolli.The Manager: Shyqri Rrelli.The Goalkeeper: Blendi Nallbani.2 April. Hotel Terminus, Marcel Ophuls’s documentary on Klaus Barbie, includes an ...

Tony and Caroline

Ben Pimlott, 26 November 1987

Out of the Wilderness: Diaries 1963-67 
by Tony Benn.
Hutchinson, 592 pp., £14.95, October 1987, 0 09 170660 2
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... of the mid-Sixties. In those days socialism did not feature – even in the rhetoric. True, Anthony Crosland, Benn’s mentor and former tutor, had used the word in the title of a famous book in 1956. By the time this section of diary opens, however, it had gone right out of vogue. In the run-up to its most important postwar election victory, Labour’s ...

What’s Happening in the Engine-Room

Penelope Fitzgerald: Poor John Lehmann, 7 January 1999

John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure 
by Adrian Wright.
Duckworth, 308 pp., £20, November 1998, 0 7156 2871 2
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... the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril Connolly, who, we are told, stood at the door of his room in the Sixth Form Passage asking, ‘Well, Johnny Lehmann, how are you this afternoon?’ While he was at Trinity his sister Rosamond published her first novel, Dusty ...

Grand Old Man

Robert Blake, 1 May 1980

The Last Edwardian at No 10: An Impression of Harold Macmillan 
by George Hutchinson.
Quartet, 151 pp., £6.50, February 1980, 0 7043 2232 3
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... from Disraeli, just as Attlee descended from Campbell-Bannerman, Gaitskell from Gladstone, Mr Heath from Peel. Disraeli was the greatest leader of the opposition in all history. Harold Macmillan never had to play that part, but who can doubt how good he would have been if the task had fallen his way. Mr Macmillan’s career, like that of everyone who gets ...

Living with Monsters

Ferdinand Mount: PMs v. the Media, 22 April 2010

Where Power Lies: Prime Ministers v. the Media 
by Lance Price.
Simon & Schuster, 498 pp., £20, February 2010, 978 1 84737 253 6
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... to get a call from the Tory whips’ office suggesting that he might hint that the rebel MP Sir Anthony Nutting was ‘terribly under the influence of his American mistress’. I am not sure whether this was better or worse than Campbell’s ultimatum to Robin Cook that he must choose between his wife and his mistress. In any event, Clark resigned soon ...

Smart Alec

Peter Clarke, 17 October 1996

Alec Douglas-Home 
by D.R. Thorpe.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 540 pp., £25, October 1996, 1 85619 277 6
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... revenge,’ some muttered – and thus sharpened the knives for the successful challenges to Heath in 1975 and to Thatcher in 1990. The presence of a newspaper cutting among Home’s papers at the Hirsel provides an interesting clue to the mystery of his rise to power. In December 1962 Anthony Howard wrote a piece for ...

Four Moptop Yobbos

Ian Penman, 17 June 2021

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time 
by Craig Brown.
Fourth Estate, 642 pp., £9.99, March, 978 0 00 834003 2
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The Beatles and Sixties Britain 
by Marcus Collins.
Cambridge, 382 pp., £90, March 2020, 978 1 108 47724 6
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The Beatles in Context 
edited by Kenneth Womack.
Cambridge, 372 pp., £74.99, January 2020, 978 1 108 41911 6
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... ends up producing a fable very much in their own image.In​ June 1961, the Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess and his first wife, Lynne, took a holiday in the USSR. In Cold War Leningrad there were echoes for Burgess of his backstreet Manchester childhood. The music of accents: voices that were exotic yet strangely familiar, a chorus of hard-tongued ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: Where I was in 1993, 16 December 1993

... as if waiting to strike land.On Any Questions on Radio 4 tonight are Roy Hattersley and Edward Heath, Janet Cohen and Jonathon Porritt. Neither Heath nor Hattersley is a particular favourite of mine but because no one on the panel is extreme in their views, discussion is sensible and without point-scoring and one has the ...
The New Select Committees: A Study of the 1979 Reforms 
edited by Gavin Drewry.
Oxford, 410 pp., £25, September 1985, 9780198227854
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Commons Select Committees: Catalysts for Progress? 
edited by Dermot Englefield.
Longman, 288 pp., £15, May 1984, 0 582 90260 6
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British Government and the Constitution: Text, Cases and Materials 
by Colin Turpin.
Weidenfeld, 476 pp., £25, September 1985, 0 297 78651 2
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Parliament in the 1980s 
edited by Philip Norton.
Blackwell, 208 pp., £19.50, July 1985, 0 631 14056 5
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... behaviour – a move towards independence and rebellion which began in the early 1970s when the Heath Administration had a working majority and which provided the impetus for the select committee reforms of 1979. On his view, expressed once more in Parliament in the 1980s, significant structural and procedural reforms are achievable, but only if the ...

Candle Moments

Andrew O’Hagan: Norman Lewis’s Inventions, 25 September 2008

Semi-Invisible Man: The Life of Norman Lewis 
by Julian Evans.
Cape, 792 pp., £25, June 2008, 978 0 224 07275 5
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... as and when they occur. We saw this at work quite spectacularly in Roger Lewis’s biography of Anthony Burgess, in Geoff Dyer’s nicely solipsistic account of D.H. Lawrence, in Jonathan Coe’s artful enhancement of B.S. Johnson, and we see it here, in a more measured way. Perhaps our present conception of personality requires something more involving ...

Back to Runnymede

Ferdinand Mount: Magna Carta, 23 April 2015

Magna Carta 
by David Carpenter.
Penguin, 594 pp., £10.99, January 2015, 978 0 241 95337 2
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Magna Carta Uncovered 
by Anthony Arlidge and Igor Judge.
Hart, 222 pp., £25, October 2014, 978 1 84946 556 4
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Magna Carta 
by J.C. Holt.
Cambridge, 488 pp., £21.99, May 2015, 978 1 107 47157 3
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Magna Carta: The Foundation of Freedom 1215-2015 
by Nicholas Vincent.
Third Millennium, 192 pp., £44.95, January 2015, 978 1 908990 28 0
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Magna Carta: The Making and Legacy of the Great Charter 
by Dan Jones.
Head of Zeus, 192 pp., £14.99, December 2014, 978 1 78185 885 1
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... clauses from which remain on the statute book. One of the authors of Magna Carta Uncovered, Anthony Arlidge QC, once invoked Magna Carta when pleading a case before his co-author, Mr Justice (later Lord Chief Justice) Judge, though he lost. As I write, lawyers are planning to invoke Magna Carta in a suit against the lord chancellor, Chris ...

Tam, Dick and Harold

Ian Aitken, 26 October 1989

Dick Crossman: A Portrait 
by Tam Dalyell.
Weidenfeld, 253 pp., £14.95, September 1989, 0 297 79670 4
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... relatively short volume is not so much a biography of Crossman – that is to be provided by Anthony Howard – as a portrait of someone he clearly loved. But it is a long way from being the misty-eyed picture of a faultless hero. Black Tam o’the Binns has a reputation to maintain as a man who puts truth and objectivity before mere ...

Do what you wish, du Maurier

E.S. Turner, 31 March 1988

Maxwell 
by Joe Haines.
Macdonald, 525 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 356 17172 8
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Maxwell: The Outsider 
by Tom Bower.
Aurum, 374 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 948149 88 4
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Maxwell: A Portrait of Power 
by Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano.
Bantam, 256 pp., £12.95, February 1988, 0 593 01499 5
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Goodbye Fleet Street 
by Robert Edwards.
Cape, 260 pp., £12.95, March 1988, 0 224 02457 4
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... break his rivals. Did he ever raise the ethics of such a policy on his long walks on Hampstead Heath, when the old man stopped to piddle? As it was, the old Fleet Street almost collapsed under a weight of greed, waste, corruption, Luddism and bloody-mindedness. The Times and Sunday Times deserved Rupert Murdoch and the Daily Mirror deserved Maxwell. In ...

Closed Material

Nicholas Phillips, 17 April 2014

... It is my habit​ every morning to cycle to Hampstead Heath and to swim in a bathing pond there. My return route takes me up Downshire Hill, a broad street lined with the homes of the very rich. One house always used to puzzle me. It was very poorly maintained and swathed in invasive ivy. Then, one day in 2006, there was something about it in my local newspaper ...

Bad Dreams

Robert Crawford: Peter Porter, 6 October 2011

The Rest on the Flight: Selected Poems 
by Peter Porter.
Picador, 421 pp., £12.99, May 2010, 978 0 330 52218 2
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... at Snails Bay’, can also be set beside the work of Morgan, author of ‘Wittgenstein on Egdon Heath’. Porter spent time as a writer-in-residence in Edinburgh in the 1970s, and I remember hearing him read at Glasgow University late in that decade. I suspect that as well as reading Larkin – whose influence can be heard in some church-going Porter poems ...

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