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“... many waves there are’ and the fact of their going on and on. You think of the end of Moby-Dick (‘and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it had rolled five thousand years ago’) and of Wallace Stevens’s ‘Fabliau of Florida’ (‘There will never be an end/To this droning of the surf’) and of the way Derek Walcott would later bring ...”

“... served alongside us. The United States was, at the time, preoccupied with Vietnam, to which Harold Wilson declined to commit British troops. The Borneo campaign was won largely by our domination of the immediate area of the border with Indonesia. There were a series of operations across the border to attack Indonesian military bases and communications. None of ...”

“... Press in London. In October 1964, when I became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the late Dick Cross-man, one of the instructions he gave me was that if ever Mr Arthur Gavshon wanted to see him, I was to make sure that his Principal Private Secretary at the Ministry of Housing made a slot for Gavshon within 24 hours in the Ministerial ...”

“... that decade. It is certainly one of the weirder facts of literary and cultural history that Moby-Dick should have been almost totally ignored for over half a genteel century, almost as if a consciousness of dependence on Europe made it seem risky to assert the existence of a great indigenous novel, indeed of a great and, as Lawrence called it, a classic ...”

“... a mode of viewing that is ‘critical-paranoid’ (I mean this term positively, as Philip K. Dick did when he defined the paranoiac as a person hell-bent on the truth). In the mid-19th century a French painter might remove any evidence of industrial production from his beautiful landscapes, while his American counterpart might work to assimilate the ...”

“... has been involved ever since 1970, was nothing but a sham, a fraud and a hoax (or, to borrow Dick Crossman’s phrase about Cabinet Government, ‘a gaily painted hoarding behind which lie hidden the real secrets of power’). In the light of the resources and energy the Church over the past two decades has thrown into adapting itself to an elected ...”

“... it in TV, they would have to sharpen-up their act. Working for Lew Grade’s ATV with the writers Dick Hills and Sid Green, they subtly altered the relationship between the stage personae of Eric and Ern. Over the course of six series between 1961 and 1968 something developed between the pair that made them look less like an act and more like a ...”

“... Government in the Forties, supported Gaitskell in the battles of the Fifties and were appointed to Wilson’s Cabinet in the Sixties. Both served their country and party honourably, faithfully and as selflessly as anyone can reasonably be expected to do. Both exhibited, to an almost alarming degree, the characteristic Fabian virtues of rationality and ...”

“... the momentous (insanity) and the everyday offhandedly together. In an anecdotal chapter on Angus Wilson, P.N. Furbank quotes a similar passage from his Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, in which a bossy woman hectors a small boy, ‘so creating a deep psychic trauma that was to cause him to be court-martialled for cowardice many years later in World War Three’. The ...”

“... or wasn’t only, a pulp craftsman embittered by the faint praise he’d been lobbed by Edmund Wilson before the likes of Eliot and Auden announced themselves as fans. Slick magazine writers were no good either – ‘their scenes are almost tiresomely neat … but they are little men who have forgotten how to pray’ – and when discussing the right way ...”

“... This breach of protocol could hardly have come from a spontaneous welling-up of anger in Joe Wilson of South Carolina. To violate the hush of that monumental chamber required as much forethought and wild resolution as it would take to shout ‘God damn!’ in a cathedral. Wilson had done nothing previous of ...”

“... good memory for apparel, possessed that keen sense of self-preservation that the more emotional ‘Dick’ Hannay lacked. ‘I certainly didn’t address him the way I had at other times, as Mr Hoover.’ I should just about think not. A year later, Mrs Rosenstiel, still a martyr to her hubby’s specialised tastes, was commanded to another Plaza soirée (I ...”

“... gleeful. It is Book-of-the-Dead Time. After the war, she seeks out her father, a journalist called Dick Wyndham (he was divorced from her mother when Joan was two). She goes to parties with his rather pre-war friends, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Koestler, Stephen Spender. She has an affair with Lucian Freud, she visits Oxford, becomes pregnant and marries into a ...”

“... We’ – meaning Americans – ‘are now in an energy crisis.’ A few days later Vice-President Dick Cheney, like Bush a Texas oil industry veteran, announced a new American policy of generating more energy, rather than conserving existing supplies, and predicted that the US would need between 1300 and 1900 new power stations in the next twenty years, most ...”

“... on you. Cimmie: Went to lunch at Maryland today, found Princess Louise, Lady Londesburgh, Jack Wilson ... I tried desperately hard to be friendly and gay. It was the fashion in the Mosleys’ circle for husbands to try to get off with other people’s wives: this was another of the ‘rules of the game’ to which Nicholas Mosley’s title refers. But if ...”