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“... couple who alternate between starving and gorging themselves. (The novel was turned into a film by Alan Parker, starring Anthony Hopkins, John Cusack and Bridget Fonda.) In A Friend of the Earth Boyle turns his squinting attention to environmentalism, creating a disconcerting marriage of farce and prophecy: he doesn’t doubt the looming apocalypse; he merely ...”

“... Addams ‘and his wife, Deborah Kerr’. 24 September. Marcel Marceau dies. Much hated by Peter Cook (‘Marcel Arsehole’), who couldn’t stand the reverence with which mime was treated. Still it gave him a good joke: ‘I was there,’ he used to say, ‘the night Marcel Marceau dried.’ 2 October. Ned Sherrin dies who very much figured in the second ...”

“... Richardson, Modernist, struggling to light a recalcitrant wood stove or wearing galoshes to cook breakfast in a flooded kitchen. In the Twenties and Thirties, Richardson’s work was frequently linked with that of Joyce and Woolf. By the time of Joyce’s death, his reputation was firmly established. Woolf finally attained prominence in the ...”

“... continue her work. (It was the first time anyone in Oxford had even thought of such a thing.) The cook, cleaner, housekeeper and nanny – and later, scholarships to Eton – helped, too, of course. A memorable photograph of Hodgkin in 1947, aged just 37, beaming and surrounded by her trio of tiny children, turns out to have been taken on the occasion of her ...”

“... intimidated two other African Americans, Conley’s girlfriend and the husband of Frank’s cook, into retracting evidence favourable to the accused man, who was duly sentenced to death. A massive national campaign to force a new trial failed before the Georgia and US Supreme Courts, while the former Populist Tom Watson used his newspaper to whip up ...”

“... the length and breadth of Ireland, and indeed Britain (where he spends a year with another madman, Alan), until his death at the hands of a swineherd. Sweeney’s hardships already have some popular literary currency, in the work of Flann O’Brien (Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called ...”

“... first few frames from which are reproduced on page 10). Certainly the French weren’t, as Alan Riding’s recent report in the New York Times suggests. Or some of the French weren’t. The critic in the Figaro thought Stéphane Heuet’s graphic version of ‘Combray’, the first section of Proust’s first volume (200 pages, called ...”

“... to read about the day seven chauffeurs mutinied over their treatment by a sneakily parsimonious cook. Two fussy maiden ladies who asked about the cost of stabling their Austin Seven were told ‘If you care to take it up to your bedroom there will be no charge for garage.’ I do not like to think what he would have told me to do with my sports Morgan ...”

“... Cantley, whose outrageously biased speech (in favour of the defence) was satirised by Peter Cook in the character of Justice Cocklecarrot. In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve to ...”

“... acknowledgments, from R.W. Wailes, expert on the windmills of Nottinghamshire in 1951, to Rosemary Cook, who rubbed the brass of Sir Edward Grey for the Staffordshire volume.So as the series developed it took on some of the colouring of the local antiquarian tradition. It was a successor not only to Dehio but also to Britton and Brayley’s early 19th-century ...”

“... on than the back wall of the Batley Working Men’s club before a Dusty Springfield concert.Peter Cook once did a sketch when, dressed as Garbo, he was filmed touring the streets in an open-topped limousine shouting through a megaphone ‘I want to be alone’. Larkin wasn’t quite as obvious as that but poetry is a public address system too and that his ...”

“... them to eat in the staff canteen if they want to eat in a restaurant. They think the in-house cook offers up the wrong things. We deliver what they order up.’ The consequences of this change for the culture of the BBC were profound. In one sense, producers found their new role as salesmen invigorating. What Born describes as a ‘new seduction, a ...”

“... sense of things to be more nuanced than that. I remember, just after the 1979 election, meeting Alan Fisher of Nupe, who had played the starring role in the Winter of Discontent. ‘A lot of people think,’ he said, with unmistakable pride at being so important, ‘that we really brought down the Labour Government.’ But didn’t he think that thus ...”

“... through the roof of the burning building, and departs for New Zealand. In a prefatory note Robert Alan Jamieson calls his book ‘a yarn’, and if the yarn doesn’t read too convincingly it is perhaps because he is chiefly interested in other things: the face of external nature in Shetland, and the quality of life – narrow, enduring, heroic – exhibited ...”

“... the horrors of the first half of the 20th century. The title is borrowed from Robert Graves and Alan Hodge, whose social history of Britain from 1918 to 1939, The Long Weekend, appeared in 1940, and it conjures up a sepia image of a tranquil Indian summer ‘in which the sun set slowly on the British Empire and the shadows lengthened on the lawns of a ...”