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“... resort wear’: suitcase-free vacationers would buy paper clothes on arrival at their hotel (a bell-bottom jumpsuit would cost $4), then discard the items on their way out, a lightness in their step. The idea lingers today in the paper gowns of hospital workers, and in the playful work of such designers as Hussein Chalayan, who produced a paper airmail ...”

“... sex in flagrante. I don’t think we ever did but sometimes a man in dark blue – navy blue – bell-bottoms would rise from a clearing in the whins and shout at us fiercely. This was the 1950s. The Royal Navy was no longer the largest in the world – the two great Cold War powers had overtaken it – but its history as ‘the pre-eminent sea-fighting ...”

“... the three great intellects of the 20th century. Who were the others? he asked. Albert Einstein and Ian Gilmour, she allegedly replied. Let no one say that Margaret Thatcher was a slave to consistency. Within four years, the Einstein of British Conservatism had been sacked from the Cabinet. This is not Ranelagh’s only eccentric disclosure. As well as being ...”

“... hairdos, Campari and perilous conversation pits; equally, it might not. In one street, multiple bell pushes and their attendant wires are replaced by a single intercom. Wooden blinds have arrived. But the neighbouring streets still provide the decor of deprivation for photographers such as Roger Mayne: scorched curtains, three-legged ...”

“... So the majority are actresses (Elsie and Leigh), academics (Cam and Darbishire), artists (Bell, Cohen, Knight) or authors (Allingham, Blyton, Compton-Burnett, Sackville-West and Sitwell), topped off with occasional politicians (Astor, Bonham Carter and Lady Lloyd-George) and royals (Princess Marina, Queen Victoria Eugénie, the Princess Royal). Vera ...”

“... sworn to tell the truth here. Later, Berisha recalls seeing Serbian paramilitaries in the bell-tower of the church: milosevic: I am asking you whether you saw them shoot at anyone. berisha: Not only once, but many times. I saw it with my own eyes. And to go from one house to another, you had to go in the shadow of the walls. The reply continues for ...”

“... here of other, quite different books: To Kill a Mockingbird; the Swallows and Amazons series; Ian Seraillier’s The Silver Sword, about an orphan in Warsaw during the Second World War; Claude Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon conducted research into the capacity of phone networks on behalf of the ...”

“... nobody has heard of, or cares about, Spring of the Lamb by Douglas Woolf. Sorry? Doesn’t ring a bell. One of the rarest, most delicately obtuse talents lost by America: a skeletal revenant too canny to leave any footprints in the dust. (‘He’s come down from Kellogg or Wallace – Idaho camptowns, feathery silver markets on the far tip of the right ...”

“... whose offspring will represent the future unity of a now divided nation. Agatha (‘Gatty’) Bell in the first story, Sally Niven in the second, are Lowland women who marry Highland men, though in circumstances which involve the rejection, with fatal consequences, of a third lover, a rejection which risks the success of the union, both marital and ...”

“... are let into a green oasis that operates like the Marshalsea Prison: if you are inside when the bell sounds, you stay the night. Low-level flats, from an era of less boastful regeneration, are set back from the road behind cushions of coarse grass, teardrop flower-beds planted in an attractively random fashion. The latest blocks, blindly monolithic, devour ...”

“... for days.The graph of these outcomes takes the shape of what is probably the best-known PDF, the bell-shaped curve of the ‘normal’ or ‘Gaussian’ distribution (after Carl Friedrich Gauss), with a single symmetrical peak at one or two blue or red balls, descending more or less steeply on each side to the ‘tails’ of the distribution, which cover the ...”

“... two coasts at once. The summit of Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran can be seen in the west, and the Bell Rock, smack in the Firth of Forth, is clear on the other side, down to the east. Walking up to the burial mound, Karl and I were approached by a herd of cattle. ‘Good, good,’ said Seamus, coming up and flicking them away. ‘A square-go in ...”

“... and sordid, of respectable diplomacy. Jeremy was the first person I came across who admired Ian Fleming, and I still have an edition of Live And Let Die that he plucked from the ex libris shelf of Boots Library for a shilling in 1956 and presented to me on the spot. Two other things were in the air – death and drink, which in Jeremy’s case went hand ...”

“... American white power internationalism and American anti-communism dramatically converged. In 1965, Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence from Britain, emboldened by support from across the US political establishment, from Dean Acheson to Bob Dole. When Reagan, as a presidential candidate, began flirting with the ...”

“... as a landmark in the new, anything-goes TV. He also brings out its ambiguities. He talks to Ian McShane, who plays the brothel keeper Al Swearengen, about working with David Milch, the show’s creator, and Paula Malcolmson, who plays Trixie, Swearengen’s moll.In one scene, Trixie gets roughed up by a customer and shoots him. McShane recalls, ‘I ...”