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“... friend Henry Fonda that he was a natural actor. Carole Lombard, who had worked with Fredric March, Charles Laughton, William Powell and John Barrymore, thought him more remarkable than any of them. On screen, his name appeared as James Stewart, and he worked hard at every detail. He was a canny businessman. Before the Second ...”

“... the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles Whiting, in his ’45: The Final Drive from the Rhine to the Baltic, provides repulsive detail which makes such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of ...”

“... of the new period into which Negroes appear to be emerging.’ Opportunity’s editor was Charles Johnson, a key figure in the New Negro movement, who thirty years later recalled the Harlem Renaissance as ‘that sudden and altogether phenomenal outburst of emotional expression, unmatched by any comparable period in American or Negro American ...”

“... effortlessly since birth from one favourable literary atmosphere to another. His father had heard Charles Dickens read when he was six, had helped to found Granta and furiously defended the Liberal cause at the Punch table. John himself had been at Eton with Alan Pryce-Jones, Anthony Powell, Eric Blair and Cyril ...”

“... with Sophie, at one time ‘the surest thing between Bridgend and Carmarthen town’, wife of Charles Norris, one of the male group who meet at the Bible, who is a co-owner in the restaurant business with his brother Victor: ‘Absolutely not my cup of tea. He’s ... you know.’ ‘What, you mean ...’ ‘Well, we’re not supposed to mind them these ...”

“... by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to go to ...”

“... of essays on ‘the practice of kingship’ edited by the late Gerald Harriss in 1985, and Ted Powell, in his important book on the king’s administration of justice, published in 1989. Vale makes no reference to the latter, but he is open about his dependence on the former, especially on Jeremy Catto’s essays ‘The King’s Servants’ and ...”

“... who are coming in from outside the EU.’ A former Ukip councillor praised ‘the prophet’ Enoch Powell, who became an Ulster Unionist Party MP after leaving the Conservatives. There was talk of shackles and slavery. A preacher gave thanks for our deliverance from ‘Babylonian’ Europe. ‘Lord keep your hand upon our little province,’ he prayed. ‘Lord ...”

“... two weeks before his death (1955). 'Portrait of Charlie Parker' by Beauford Delaney (1968). 'Charles the First' by Jean-Michel Basquiat (1982). Charlie Parker at a photomat, Kansas City (1940).PreviousNext William Burroughs said that you should never trust anyone who looked the same from photo to photo; Parker can appear a wholly different person across ...”

“... Somerset Maugham and William Dean Howells their dues, and resurrected the novels of Dawn Powell from neglect. Confronted with reams of words which speak so forthrightly for themselves, Kaplan resorts to academic robot-talk, wading into a minor comic escapade like Vidal’s novel Myron (the sequel to Myra Breckinridge) with lead boots: ‘Like Myra ...”

“... coherent syndrome call it populist authoritarianism, and date its rise from the emergence of Enoch Powell as a national hero after his ‘river of blood’ speech in 1968. I wonder whether it is all as simple as that. The question is not whether there is a logical connection between these attitudes, libertarian in economic and repressive in constitutional ...”

“... power, superiority, pre-eminence or authority ecclesiastical or spiritual within this realm’? Charles Moore, former editor of the Daily Telegraph and Margaret Thatcher’s official biographer, turned his fire on the archbishop of Canterbury: ‘I do feel that the archbishop, when looking at Brexit, should remember the Act in Restraint of Appeals. After ...”

“... havoc on reaching actual size, but he was less impressive and more sinister than that, a King Charles spaniel of vicious temperament, a cute Walt Disney rattlesnake, or a beautiful child vampire. He was hardly an angel in the 1890s, but he truly blossomed after Oscar’s death, when he converted to heterosexuality and the Catholic Church. Wilde called him ...”

“... Witness the use made of his ‘epistemes’ by N.C. Gillespie, who, in his recent study of Charles Darwin and the Problem of Creation (1979), implied that there were only two epistemes worth talking about: the ‘positivist’, with its exclusion of metaphysics and natural theology, and the ‘creationist’, which was ultimately, if not ...”

“... portrait by his UN colleague Brian Urquhart, and a perceptive study by the Berkeley historian Charles Henry that treats Bunche both as a significant figure in his own right and as a prism through which to examine America’s racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his ...”