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“... for a media award these days: undermining of elected authority.’ His second pet hate is Peter Hennessy – one of the very few journalists to explore and expose the inner recesses of the Civil Service. Sir Bernard hates Brian Redhead of the Today programme, which he regards as subversive, hates Mark Lawson of the Independent, whom he describes as a ...”

“... Zealand’s “best” writers grouped around Katherine Mansfield, Allen Curnow, Frank Sargeson, James K. Baxter and Janet Frame’. Serious fiction and poetry have been ‘privileged’ over other genres, which have been ‘marginalised’. All this needs correction, ‘Even the notion of “literature” itself,’ he continues, ‘must come under ...”

“... but ended up running a tiny, undemanding parish in the City, overshadowed by St Paul’s. Robert Peter, a brilliant Classics scholar at Cambridge, ‘achieved so little because he was a fool’; moreover, he was cruel to choirboys and horses. Henry Carrington, a dilettante, failed to take on the Dissenters, resorted to wintering in Italy, leaving curates ...”

“... into close relations with Hugh Gaitskell. It would be unkind as well as inaccurate to call him the Peter Mandelson of the Gaitskell years, not least because, unlike Mandelson, he had established constituency roots before he began and also because, unlike Mandelson, he had rather little impact on the actual presentation of the Party’s policies, which remained ...”

“... Parliament, Lord Wedgwood certainly deserves most of the tributes he receives from Robert Rhodes James in a Foreword to this work. On the other hand, even in the Thirties it was optimistic of Wedgwood to suppose that the compilation of biographies of Members of the Commons would necessarily reveal the more admirable qualities of those Englishmen who ...”

“... of a major new artist’, but the Observer sees nothing but ‘duff bravura and blank poise’. Peter Fuller, editor of Modern Painters, fears for the hyped Conroy. The Times Literary Supplement: a ‘sinister portent’. The Financial Times critic describes the paintings with care, but fetches up with ‘a scumbled emptiness’. The Tablet concedes ‘a ...”

“... why, for example, are we not told on the first page of the first essay that it is a review of James Watson’s book, The Double Helix, and was published in 1968? A lot of things have changed since then, and the reader needs to know, before reaching page 258, that the essay on page 3 is something of a period-piece. It would have been nice if Professor ...”

“... were affectionate but equivocal. They had been close friends at Cambridge, along with Hallam and James Spedding, and FitzGerald had hero-worshipped Tennyson and his verse. Tennyson called him ‘old Fitz’, patronised him, and accepted from him quite large sums of money, being subsidised at one point to the tune of three hundred a year, a large figure in ...”

“... Upholsterer was produced in 1758, Alzuma in 1773. And while we are on the drama, let us remember James Robinson Planché, born in Piccadilly, London on 27 February 1796, who is part of the Romantic Period and inventor of the Christmas pantomime. The list of his plays runs to over 150 items, and his entry to seven pages. (Shakespeare gets five and a ...”

“... about Eliot’), Bernard van Dieren is a ‘dim thing with the grey face in napless velvet’, Peter Warlock roars obscenities, Maynard Keynes (‘trying to turn himself into a heterosexual with a ballet dancer’) leers at Toomey, James Agate (‘a well-known sodomite’) makes a pass at the dreadful Heinz ... One is ...”

“... or experimental verse, as opposed to more traditional or mainstream poets such as Robert Lowell, James Merrill and Richard Wilbur – the sorts likely to be published in the New Yorker and awarded Pulitzers. In those days, you were on one side or the other. Creeley was defiantly on The New American Poetry side, and his work figures prominently in that hugely ...”

“... who had been an outstanding chancellor of the exchequer. Even failures at the Treasury, such as James Callaghan, sometimes become party leaders, and a highly successful chancellor like Clarke should have been in an overwhelmingly strong position for the job. This was particularly so as there was no other clearly suitable candidate. Nevertheless, Europhobia ...”

“... script. The church’s columns were chalked with words too, and the Word of God – a King James Bible, ‘User’s Guide on Back’ – appeared to float unabashed on a sea of London scrawls. For a few days after the explosions, the atmosphere was bad on the buses. Passengers were looking into every face as they sat on a Number 30 from King’s ...”

“... some of them much more obscure than these, are not. Consequently the reader’s share, as Henry James called it, is quite half; or, to put it another way, unless you are a polymathic historian with some knowledge of literature you will need to do quite a lot of research to figure out what Paulin is doing. This is not a complaint; we are dealing with a ...”

“... Toots, alert but not obstreperous’. On seeing Second Storey Sunlight exhibited, a third critic, James Flexner, wrote to Hopper: I felt both in the formal and emotional tensions of your painting a pull between restraint and the opulence of nature. Restraint represented by the peaked architecture and the old lady for whom all passion is spent; opulence, by ...”