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“... the opportunity to bring a new depth and perception to profiles, has done no better. A profile of Nigel Lawson, ‘maverick at Number 11’, at the time of the Chancellor’s last Mansion House speech, was no more than a review of his four years at the Treasury. Only Terry Coleman, in his extended Guardian interviews, gets close to his subjects. The ...”

“... came back from the edge so often does not mean the edge was not real, or that he was not ready to cross it, and he himself could always upskittle his poses with flashes of amazing candour: ‘What nonsense! I’ve never helped the Palestinians. They’ve helped me to live.’ Unlike many other literary players in the world of politics, Genet remembered the ...”

“... seen at its best in Hitler’s War, is a pyrotechnic display of skill in the interweaving of and cross-cutting between dozens of sources, each from the pen or tongue of men pitted in the struggle of great events. But the effect, wonderful as it usually is, depends for its force on our unfamiliarity with the story or the material and often both. Here the ...”

“... posed in front of a provincial isolation hospital: period domesticity verging on John Wyndham or Nigel Kneale. Conventional pieties. The dress, the white shirt and ironed tie, the pipe. Such serenity summons up, for a generation queasy with paranoia, biological experiments, government-funded research, something nasty behind metal-frame ...”

“... be able to tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a ...”

“... his pigs had the fever. ‘If it goes on much longer it will ruin me,’ he said.When I arrived at Nigel Rowe’s farm near Dedham only the weather was Constable-like. Out of his window the fields were bare and flat. ‘European pig meat is cheaper to produce,’ he said, ‘because we have higher standards and higher production costs. As soon as foreign bacon ...”

“... ought to have as much contempt for Boris Johnson’s Faragist Conservative Party as he does for Nigel Farage himself. And yet he appears to be doing his utmost to steer it to greater power. The work of Victor, and those grand 20th-century military bureaucrats Cummings idolises, is far closer to the data-amenable world of problem/solution than modern ...”

“... 84 linen tablecloths, 800 napkins and 47 finger bowls. Though the Corsair carried enough coal to cross the Atlantic, Morgan often sent her ahead while he travelled to Europe on White Star liners. The Corsair was used for taking friends on cruises in the Mediterranean and along the coast of Italy, and, on the return home, to steam out to pick his party up ...”

“... constructed by the murderer – they can turn the detective into a literary critic. In that novel Nigel Strangeways realises the truth after he has read the diary and thought about its phrasing and the context of his discovery of it, reading the text and reading between the lines in the same way the reader is meant to read any detective story.It’s all very ...”

“... hours. (With another hour thrown in to detour recent excavations, schlep the peninsula path and cross the odd motorway.) How long could it take on public transport? The Millennium Experience copywriters spoke with breathtaking self-confidence of a ‘12-minute’ ride from the centre of town (by helicopter presumably). The diggings on the peninsula (a ...”

“... and G.S. Rousseau on late 18th-century nerves could just as usefully have been a lot shorter. Nigel Smith is fascinating on ‘The uses of Hebrew in the English Revolution’ and Peter Burke’s little sketch of post-Medieval uses of Latin is wide-ranging and excellent. Other chapters suffer from being wide-ranging and bad. Victor Kiernan’s ‘Languages ...”

“... March. A cold bright day in Yorkshire and I sit briefly at the end of the garden, watching a plane cross a vast sea of blue sky, leaving a single unfurled trail behind it. A plane such as this moving across virgin space must be more of a treat for the spectator than the pilot; it puts me in mind of myself as a child longing to be the first to jump (never ...”

“... an appointment cutting across the role of Richard Hall, the paper’s Africa Correspondent. Nigel Hawkes, then Foreign News Editor, resigned that post in protest. The independent directors did not feel themselves called upon to adjudicate in that dispute since it was the editor’s own decision finally to hire Mutatu for a trial period, even though the ...”

“... she just looked like a Scarlet Woman.15 April. Watch five minutes of Have I Got News for You with Nigel Farage the guest and Ian Hislop and Paul Merton their usual genial selves. I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives ...”

“... especially by themselves? Is the line between the real and the fictional fixed, and could I cross the line of my own inquiry and do the police in different voices? Could I take a dead young man’s name and see how far I could go in animating a fake life for him? How wrong would it be to go on such a journey and do what these men had done? I chose to ...”