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“... imposed a ban on any music deemed too fast or too slow to comply with the ‘Chechen mentality’. Taylor Swift is a no-no – too fast. The Russian national anthem – too slow. There would seem to be a political subtext here, along the lines of ‘One’s just as bad as the other,’ but let it pass.Where would Arthur Russell fit on the Chechnya ...”

“... as a stone deity. Obviously, I thought, we have strayed into the wrong ward, much as Elizabeth Taylor did in the film of Suddenly Last Summer. Mam was not ill like this. She had nothing to do with the distracted creature who sat by the nearest bed, her gown hitched high above her knees, banging her spoon on a tray. But as I turned to go I saw that Dad was ...”

“... and he put a ship’s bell in the garden. (The original lighthouse was built by his uncle Alan, 12 miles south-west of Tiree.) Fanny put benches here and there, so that Stevenson could sit on sunny days with a writing board perched on his knee.Sir Henry Taylor, a colonial reformer and poet-dramatist, had a villa in ...”

“... The final infusion of the three 21-day cycles of chemo is done. I’ve been of a mind to follow Alan Bennett’s excellent observation that he doesn’t wish to be so familiar with the treatment as to call it by its nickname. But adding the ‘therapy’ each time has become peculiarly tedious and needlessly pointed. Back when, I used to pronounce ...”

“... the Mall every time. Lloyd Bentsen, the prince of Capitol influence-peddlers, gets the Treasury. Alan Greenspan, the reactionary fan of Ayn Rand, who has roosted at the Federal Reserve these many years, is beseeched to ‘stay on’. Winston Lord, an old Kissinger hand, gets the Asia desk at State. Les Aspin, a plaything of the military contractors, is ...”

“... in a school and stabbed 23 children, of whom eight died. Ferdinand is from Peckham, where Damilola Taylor was murdered, and spoke prominently about that, so he and Alan Smith went to the school to express their condolences. This is exactly the kind of thing that English footballers tend not to do, so good for him. This was ...”

“... financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. Schwartz, who represented Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Truman Capote and Mel Brooks. ‘May the Schwartz be with you,’ Brooks joked in Spaceballs. He already was.As the plane began its descent, swinging over Santa Clarita, down across the Santa ...”

“... Plan’ to guarantee ‘the common security of the whole world’. Well after the 1980s, when Alan Milward dismantled the myth that the Marshall Plan had injected capital into a continent that lacked it, rather than unlocking capital already there and speeding up a recovery already underway, liberal historians – mostly American – continued to extol ...”

“... Literary​ fans, as Alan Bennett once remarked, can be off-putting for the rest of us. Certain writers’ books get ‘fenced off by enthusiasts, and the casual reader may feel the need of credentials to read them’. Between 1956 and 1981 Mary Renault published eight novels set in ancient Greece that made her enormously, wildly popular ...”

“... neat malice! How, in their own fashion, well-written and truthful and honest they are!’ A.J.P. Taylor said that Channon’s ‘rank highest among the political diaries of the period: written, as all good diaries should be, by a man not ashamed to own his weaknesses, it recaptures perfectly the atmosphere of the 1930s.’ Reading the two diaries long ago, I ...”

“... now called the ‘Holy Circle’ the strikingly handsome Geoffrey Phibbs, later known as Geoffrey Taylor. After some months with Graves and Riding (who insisted on burning Phibbs’s clothes and confiscating his books as part of his induction into the circle) Phibbs and Graves’s wife decided they would rather be a more orthodox duo than part of the ...”

“... The same list in 1987 saw knighthoods bestowed on Frank Gibb (chairman and chief executive of Taylor Woodrow which had given £35,000 to the Party in the previous financial year) and Derek Alun-Jones (a director of Royal Insurance, which had also given £35,000 the previous year). At the height of the Tory leadership crisis in November 1990, a group of ...”

“... and a few months later Lawson resigned. The ostensible reason was his inability to work with Alan Walters, Thatcher’s personal economic adviser, whom she had refused to sack when Lawson asked her. But really he had reached the limits of his capacity to endure what he saw as her growing intolerance of views she didn’t share. Thatcher had used the ...”

“... Notting Hill, in a rooming-house in Bedford Gardens, just off Kensington Church Street. My friend Alan worked for a travel company and their office was just round the corner. It was a different London then. Notting Hill was still a place of independent pubs and bookshops, and it had more danger and less of the gentility featured in the film Notting ...”