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“... breviary of the cult of JFK, there appears the following vignette. Schlesinger had been asked to carpenter a ‘White Paper’ justifying Washington’s destabilisation of Cuba, in which the high-flown rhetoric of the New Frontier might form a sort of scab over the fouler business of empire. This task he readily performed, scampering back to the Oval Office ...”

“... directed at critical areas of medical disagreement: Oliver Sacks’s surgeon calls himself a ‘carpenter’, treating his highly-qualified patient as a block; the significant case in ‘The Prescription’ has the old doctor ready to operate for appendicitis while his ex-apprentice proposes hypnosis and psychic liberation. There are three reminiscential ...”

“... into a yard, with sheds where wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a low-ceilinged room with the plainest of furnishings.The historian ...”

“... in the shape of That Was the Week That Was, which first aired on 24 November 1962, presented by David Frost. With the cancelling of that show little more than a year later, ostensibly on the grounds that it interfered with the BBC’s duty of impartiality in the run-up to the 1964 election, the heyday of anti-establishment comedy was already over. Yet its ...”

“... that he had at most three years to live, released him into the care of Ernst Zimmer, a local carpenter. Zimmer inhabited what had been part of the old city wall. Here in his tower room – now the home of the Hölderlin Society – Hölderlin played his piano and flute for hours on end and received visits from literary young men, among them Wilhelm ...”

“... the claws were bared less often. These extracts, chosen by Benson’s splendid biographer, David Newsome, from among the four million words of the diaries Benson left as his memorial, are taken from a period in Benson’s life when he was uncertain and hypersensitive, so the claws are out. It was at the turn of the century, and Benson, having been ...”

“... early death at the age of 44. As a boy playing on Berkhamsted Common, Greene had cast himself as David Balfour, and as a novelist he can be thought to have given his own bleak twist to the kind of ‘adventure story’ with which Stevenson’s name was for so long associated. In 1949 he began to write a biography of Stevenson, abandoning it only when he ...”

“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... wealthy interlopers​ most determined to flout local traditions were the Barclay brothers. Sir David and Sir Frederick, owners of the Daily Telegraph, became interested in Sark affairs after they bought the small neighbouring island of Brecqhou in 1993 and spent millions on a castle and gardens there. Under Sark’s tax laws, they were liable to pay the ...”

“... a change of heart’, and the same heart murmurs can still be heard in a review of a novel by David Garnett in 1931 (‘The non-committal manner is not a change of heart’) and again some years later in an article in Scrutiny: ‘People and civilisations are saved by a change of heart.’ This volume provides a unique opportunity to view Auden’s ideas ...”

“... in various ways, usually involving that much abused label ‘middle class’. Grandfather was a carpenter and undertaker, who made enough money to build a mission hall and see his son, Michael Foot’s father, established as a solicitor, and then as a famous Liberal MP. His sons, after the First World War, went to public schools and Oxbridge and ‘won ...”

“... then an overcrowded boat to Quebec. They were eventually reunited with Golda’s father, Moshe, a carpenter who had left for America three years earlier. Pnina Lahav writes in her new biography that Bluma and her daughters ‘were self-conscious about looking like beggars: unclean, unkempt, and exhausted’. Not long after they arrived in the US, they watched ...”

“... Gide and Wells and James and Bennett, of course, and also Max Beerbohm, Samuel Butler, Galsworthy, David Garnett, Hardy, Robert Hichens, W.H. Hudson, Lubbock, H. de Vere Stacpoole are mentioned, also Forster’s close friend G.L. Dickinson. Of another, highly gifted friend, Virginia Woolf, he has very little to say, merely a glancing though favourable ...”

“... You​ ought to be in a kindergarten,’ a Canadian nurse exclaimed to David Jones, aged twenty, awaiting transfer home in July 1916 after being wounded in Mametz Wood. Even a decade later, photographs show a wary child or an understudy for an adult. Prudence Pelham, the staunchest of his extended female fellowship, described him as ‘completely unsexed ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”