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“... get to look backwards, to say where things began. Brontë biographers have to acknowledge straight away not only the great distance separating them and us (or they ought to), but how many hills and trees now interrupt our view. It’s a truism that all Brontë biographers respond to Gaskell, but there are now thousands of other books too. Winifred ...”

“... and the melodrama work hand in hand. The moral of the film would have been queasier with, say, Michael Redgrave and John Mills in these roles. There is no other movie on which Welles worked quite this alchemy; but there are few enough actors who have done it once. Harry Lime was a romantic part, as was Mr Rochester, and a secondary thesis of Conrad’s ...”

“... and every major political system and religion. The book would like to do for free speech what Michael Sandel’s Justice did for justice; and the aspiration in this sort of endeavour is to address a high-minded public without assuming much previous knowledge.An optimistic ground tone is preserved throughout: the multiplication of our connections will ...”

“... a popular iconography, Andy Warhol is probably the most single-minded and the most spectacular,’ Michael Fried wrote in Art International in December 1962. ‘Warhol’s beautiful, vulgar, heartbreaking icons of Marilyn Monroe … and [his] feeling for what is truly human and pathetic is one of the exemplary myths of our time.’ The architect Philip Johnson ...”

“... the other extreme free-market, state-lite policies that let the weak go to the wall – or rather, straight to landfill. In a letter from London in November, Le Monde’s correspondent Philippe Bernard was dismayed to discover that refuse collectors in the UK now carry out checks on large bins meant for commercial waste and recyclables, in case they load a ...”

“... in middle age. A few years later, she also agreed to have a biography written by the historian Michael King, who took the approach of telling a ‘compassionate truth’, defined as ‘a presentation of evidence and conclusions that fulfil the major objectives of biography, but without the revelation of information that would involve the living subject in ...”

“... Littlehampton at the westernmost edge of the county. They sort two and a half million items a day. Michael Fehilly, Gatwick’s manager, strode around in a grey pinstripe suit, brown loafers and an open-necked pink shirt. He’s second-generation Irish. ‘My dad tells me I’m a plastic Paddy, not a real one,’ he said. He grew up on a council estate in ...”

“... market and local government. And it felt right, for blacks, Asians, women, gays and any number of straight white men.But not for everybody. There were those who saw the point of diversity, and even equal rights, but who objected to equality-in-diversity, a fatal combination in their view, with its suggestion that the case for homegrown, European values must ...”

“... Larkin who comes out of it as the better performer. Like other figures on the right, Paul Johnson, Michael Wharton and the Spectator crowd, Larkin regarded television as the work of the devil, or at any rate the Labour Party, and was as reluctant to be pictured as any primitive tribesman. Silly, I suppose I think this is, and also self-regarding. Hughes has ...”

“... of unplanned pregnancies – Arthur Seaton, for instance, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Michael Caine’s Alfie – while the women suffer, from their men as much as their abortions. The moral question faced by these men, who until now have been indiscriminately handing round their penises, is whether they will take responsibility for the sex that ...”

“... journalists. I was completely and utterly horrified by what I felt was almost a coup.Hammond flew straight to Washington for the annual IMF conference:When I arrived in Washington, it was to discover that the pound was in free fall … I then had to get out on the TV in Washington, to try to reinterpret the prime minister’s speech for the markets in a way ...”

“... and go, all under the cover of purchasing tobacco.It would​ be easy, but mistaken, to draw a straight line between Clarke’s return to Dublin and the rebellion he helped to lead nine years later, as though what occurred was natural, organic, inevitable and predictable, as though somehow the leadership and the circumstances matched each other, and every ...”

“... in power, made similar accusations against the Jews and many sects they deemed heretical. Michael Constantine Psellos, the Byzantine philosopher, wrote about the Bogomils: In the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls ...”

“... his compatriots wallowed in. English writers could rarely stick to the point, he wrote, or look straight at what was in front of them, ‘one eye always swivelling in the direction of fantasy’. What Powell valued was what, choosing his last word with care, Bayley tacitly deprecated as – the polite cough is audible – ‘the Gallic pattern of ...”

“... the same thing – this is my attempt to make an apology, an account that will set the record straight, even though I know this is an impossible task because so much of the record is lost.In​ genealogy, you count about 25 years per generation. If you go back to the early 1800s, that’s nine generations. If you follow both male and female lines ...”