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“... Blair pledged that his government would be ‘purer than pure’, after the former Labour adviser Derek Draper was caught boasting to the undercover journalist Greg Palast about selling his Downing Street connections to business clients. But little has changed in the intervening two and a half decades. Just 4 per cent of lobbying is recorded in ...”

“... more suited to record the passing of a tripe factory. In Poland Street, what comes to mind is Derek Raymond’s fictional ‘Factory’, the barracks of his dream police. In Golden Square, the statue of George II is shrouded, boxed for repairs. The caretaker opens up. A plaster finger on a prong of metal. A bench on which to read the second segment ...”

“... denouncing last night’s victory’ – it was the day after the Isle of Dogs by-election – ‘Derek Beackon won the council seat, opponents say, by appealing to outrage among the local, white community over the allocation of council ... Dr George Carey, the Archbish ... ’ The owner of the radio was shaking his head, twisting the aerial. ‘This’ll be ...”

“... in them. He seemed to regard the churchyard as an extension of the vicarage garden, and indeed the wall between them was so tumbledown in one place that the boundary was only a pile of long-fallen bricks in a nettle-patch. As the vicarage child I was a licensed trespasser, and I shared out my immunity amongst the ‘dirty’ children I could persuade to play ...”

“... an infant’s new life is celebrated in the language of a building, walls for protection – ‘to wall you round with love’ – rooms for comfort, and the mother’s exhausted body to be restored. Appropriately, a touching poem ends with the word ‘touch’ which, even more than seeing, is believing. Iain Crichton Smith’s Selected Poems is a volume too ...”

“... a way that could never be Italian. The bell rings. The students file back in. He calls roll: Daryl Derek Randy Kevin. He divides the classroom in two. We are going to fight the Civil War again.Liberation Day, down to the title, is a spiritual successor to Saunders’s last collection, 2013’s Tenth of December. (That long ago, really? Well, he was busy ...”

“... perfectly set by Diogenes, when he said that after his death, his body should be tossed over a wall for dogs to eat. This is logical, rational, perhaps even ecological (Laqueur discusses many suggestions about using mortal remains for compost and fertiliser), but no society has taken the Cynic philosopher’s advice (the Parsee towers are a place ...”

“... the Blackfoot Indians. Since her death in 1978, Mead’s reputation has foundered. In the 1980s, Derek Freeman, a right-wing Australian anthropologist, set off a brief frenzy in the culture wars when he tried to argue that her Samoan fieldwork was botched. But the more damaging criticisms have come from anthropologists to Mead’s left. They blame her for ...”

“... of inscribed black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of half-forgotten careerists and ...”

“... was probably what fuelled the King Mob operatives who daubed the long-lasting graffiti on a wall running alongside the Tube line between Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park: ‘Same thing day after day – tube – work – dinner – work – tube – armchair – TV – sleep – tube – work – how much more can you take? – one in ten go mad, one ...”

“... with Robert Armstrong in late December 1980 in his studio in Gorey, Co. Wexford, rests against the wall of the room where I work. We are uneasy with each other now. The talk turns to Christmas and he mentions the sadness of Gorey and that extraordinary space he made behind his father’s shop, which I think is part of the shop now, or is a store, and the ...”

“... a conspiracy to silence Carmen St Keeldare. A leaked transcript from Smith Square disguised as a Derek Raymond ‘Factory’ thriller. ‘Chapter by chapter – an embodiment, lock, stock and barrel, of the next Tory manifesto. Almost every sickly hypocritical promise and lie had been injected, like an infection, into the text of our book ... To make the ...”

“... in popular art: the studio artifices of pop music, for example, or the impossible sets and fourth wall breaking of the Hollywood musical. The ‘Dreamers, awake!’ mode rattles through mass culture over the decades: you find it in British television and pop music of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Penman says he first planned to write about Fassbinder four ...”

“... provide credos of fluent obscurity. Flaubert once said: ‘The more words there are on a gallery wall next to a picture, the worse the picture.’ Flaubert also said, in reply to a journalistic inquiry about his life, ‘I have no biography.’ The art is everything; its creator nothing. Freud, who used to read aloud to his girlfriends from Flaubert’s ...”

“... to be helping you write in secret. Why would I do that?’ ‘It might be good for fly on the wall,’ he said. ‘I’d like more fly on the wall in the book.’ He kept saying he’d done some work on the early draft but he couldn’t find it. That afternoon, as I laid out a second draft plan for the book, Julian ...”