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“... Bellow that’s in any way memorable, even a chapter that’s memorable. I’ve always liked ‘Henderson the Rain King’ for one. Oh no. Dull, dull ... I think he’s a dull man and a dull writer. Hello, Saul, how are you? Do you feel that way about Philip Roth? Oh, only more so. Philip Roth’s quite funny in a living-room but ... forget ...”

“... John Maynard Keynes is famous for his private life and associations with Bloomsbury and famous, too, as the economist who campaigned for public works between the wars, and revolutionised economics with his General Theory. A biographer of Keynes has to straddle two very different worlds, and it is one measure of Robert Skidelsky’s achievement that he writes with equal authority of both in this deeply researched and densely textured book ...”

“... it. Nor, they tell us, was he able to come to terms with his own sexuality. There are villains: Dr Henderson, Pollock’s Jungian analyst, Robert Motherwell, Clement Greenberg; and heroes and heroines: the sad, remote father, the brothers, particularly Sande, and his wife Arloie, Reuben Kadish, Roger Wilcox, Rita Benton. They write with respect about Lee ...”

“... hapless Labour Government could not be expected to have foreseen or averted, much less mastered. John Maynard Keynes, by contrast, reached for a mechanical metaphor appropriate to the current state of the art. ‘We have magneto trouble,’ he wrote in December 1930. ‘How, then, can we start up again?’ Keynesian policies, at the time and ...”

“... contributed to a no-nonsense, suck-it-and-see anti-intellectualism. For socialist playwrights like John Arden and Edward Bond, the consequence, in one case, is external and in the other a form of internal exile. But the most noted instance of the prophet rejecting his own country is the director Peter Brook who, having forged a glittering career in the British ...”

“... folie de système. They had some purchase at Harvard in the 1930s, when a physiologist, L.J. Henderson, gave a seminar on them and persuaded some young and subsequently influential sociologists that they furnished a soundly scientific counter to Marxism. Now they are sensibly ignored. So it is good to be reminded by Bucolo’s intelligent and well-edited ...”

“... began to dominate commentary both on the radio and in the papers. Practically alone of his party, John Major reacted positively, grabbing the now-famous soapbox in Luton and thereby returning to his Brixton political roots. This was the signal for an outbreak of patronising journalism by writers who clearly didn’t know what they wanted. There had been ...”

“... Harding, L.G. Salingar, Peter Ure, Ian Watt, J.C. Maxwell, L.C. Knights, D.J. Enright, Roy Strong, John Broadbent, Arthur Humphreys, Philip Collins, Pat Rogers, D.W. Jefferson and John Preston. What is disturbing is that everyone made his reputation elsewhere, often in the format which is properly Leavisian, the ...”

“... and Pig Bodine (where the effect is slangy, jivey, cartoonish); at the other end of the scale, John Braine offers us Tom Metfield, Jack Royston, Jane Framsby (can these people really exist, in our minds or anywhere else, with such leadenly humdrum, such dead names?). Saul Bellow’s inventions are Dickensian in their resonance and relish. But they also ...”

“... black hair and dark moustache, produced a quirky resemblance to Lenin. Although his biographer John Bew finds the likeness ‘somewhat forced’, he notes that contemporary observers as different in their politics as George Orwell and the Daily Mail made sport with the superficial similarity. The British Lenin might all too easily have become the David ...”

“... air-raids on Britain and other topics and spent four hours composing a letter of rebuke for Arthur Henderson – a Labour member of the War Cabinet – who had broken ranks. The authors seek to convince us that it was the Cabinet’s military adviser, the ranker-general Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, who tried to concentrate the ...”

“... who cared greatly about her blonde, pink and sometimes overweight appearance – was pleased when John Holms told her she looked like ‘a something Queen Elizabeth’. The missing adjective was ‘Surbiton’, which she would not have liked, though she was capable of accepting far crueller truths about herself than most people could dream up for her. She ...”

“... there was the emblematic flight to Brussels by the little-known new Foreign Office minister, Doug Henderson, to sign up to the European Union’s Social Chapter, followed by the restoration of the Civil Service unions to GCHQ. Then came Robin Cook’s declaration in favour of a landmine ban – achieved by the simple, but effective, technique of failing to ...”

“... in the wetness and reach safety in the cafeteria at the summit. But a 34-year-old man called John Mattinson who left the same café half an hour later was struck by lightning and died. When she read about it in the newspaper, Meades’s mother said: ‘Well, if you will stand on a cairn in a thunderstorm …’ True to his interest in ...”

“... and annoyed to be asked to write the official biography. It was largely due to his brother John, the art historian who became director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, that Pope-Hennessy was persuaded to take the commission. Royalty, John argued, was ‘an endangered species’ and this was an opportunity to examine ...”