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“... a tongueless girl was ‘a fantasy, a paradigm ... of what Paul thought a woman should be’. And James Leasor, who was with him in India during the war, immediately identified Scott with the sadistic police officer Ronald Merrick when he saw The Jewel in the Crown on TV. With all its virtues of sympathy and sensibility, this biography is much too long. A ...”

“... of Commons, 1386-1421 does not detract at all from its resounding success. In the first place, as Gerald Aylmer points out in his introductory comments, this section of the History presents the first systematic application of biographical analysis to the total membership of the Commons over a comparatively long and critical period in medieval history. Given ...”

“... many literate town-dwellers found the countryside in some way unsettling, as well as backward. James Frazer insisted that ‘the peasant remains a pagan and a savage at heart.’ Yeats said much the same but more politely: ‘Educated Ireland … does not understand how the old religion, which made of the coming and going of the greenness of the woods and ...”

“... I have never seen Francis Crick in a modest mood.’ Thus James Watson opens his notorious account of the discovery of the structure of DNA which won him, Crick and Maurice Wilkins a Nobel Prize in 1962. Whichever other of Watson’s judgments have been controversial – notably his dismissal of Rosalind Franklin, from whom, courtesy of Wilkins, he and Crick were provided with the crucial X-ray photographs of DNA crystals – his assessment of Crick has scarcely been disputed ...”

“... of fiction.’ This remark probably arose from his habitual disrespect for, or worry about, Henry James. The Ambassadors is given more attention in Aspects of the Novel than any other novel, except possibly Gide’s Les Faux-Monnayeurs, though the intention is in neither case to praise or to admire; and the Commonplace Book contains mildly disparaging remarks ...”

“... fifteen thousand of whose letters survive, has been cut down to a few hundred. Even Shaw and Henry James were reduced to four admittedly vast volumes apiece, a very small proportion of what is extant. Leonard Woolf, of whose letters eight thousand were available, has had to be shrunk to this one sizeable volume of about six hundred. His editor naturally ...”

“... invoking of economists from Keynes to the present day. Rather we should invoke the memory of Sir Gerald Nabarro, who used ribaldry, anomalies and anachronisms to make people laugh – and once a measure has become the subject of laughter its days are numbered; How many canvassers will be required to keep the poll-tax register up to date? Answer: 70 in ...”

“... dismembering of the Labour manifesto after an election defeat is something of a party tradition. Gerald Kaufman’s verdict on the 1983 programme – ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – is merely the best known. More perceptive was R.H. Tawney’s verdict on Labour’s post-1928 programme: ‘a glittering forest of Christmas trees, with presents ...”

“... a jihad. The Arab and Kurdish tribes attacked British troops, and the famed Arabist Colonel Gerald Leachman was killed. A Times leader asked how long Britain would impose on Iraq’s population ‘an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want’. T.E. Lawrence, who had helped to muster the Arab tribes for ...”

“... on the new Black Studies programme, where the visiting speakers included Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Walter Rodney and James and Grace Lee Boggs.Cruse had been recruited in response to increasing discontent among Black students at the university. The publication of The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual in 1967 had turned ...”

“... subject of a private prosecution brought by Mr Taylor against the Chief Constable of Manchester, James Anderton, which is due to be heard at Bury Magistrates Court in December: at a hearing in Manchester in October, Mr Taylor was refused information as to the grounds for setting up the investigation. This began with the familiar pattern of police ...”

“... flashy reversing, zooming and stopping as the rear cars begin to turn round. In the course of this James R. goes over to one of the cars and asks them if they are looking for the man with a hammer, whereupon a policeman leaps from the car, and ignoring the open gate, vaults theatrically over the garden wall, shouting, ‘Here, we want you!’ and the young man ...”

“... The argument that immigration is not a matter of race but of numbers can now be heard from Gerald Kaufman, among others, in connection with the citizenship rights of Chinese from Hong Kong. But by choosing this particular way in which to raise the issue, Powell diminished the area of rational discussion. The special intensity of the race issue once he ...”

“... in the book to have consistently informed on him to his rivals, the eccentric and disastrous Gerald Long, and above all his successor Charles Douglas-Home, who is presented by Harry Evans as a schemer, double-dealer and back-stabber worthy of – well, not of Shakespeare or Renaissance Italy, where disloyalty had some sinister splendour, but perhaps of ...”

“... I write something, anything, good, indifferent, or trashy, every day,’ he told his friend James Stern, ‘I feel ill.’ Spurred on by these complementary inducements – the need to make money and the need not to be sick – he wrote quantities of prose. It appeared, over the years, in an impressive range of journals, from Eliot’s Criterion and ...”