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“... presidential campaign in 2000 cost Al Gore the White House and ushered in the calamitous reign of George W. Bush. The obsession with Nader is at first puzzling: blame for Bush’s ascendancy can be traced to many other sources. Gore’s campaign was timid and bungling, but in any case he won the election and was only denied office by wholesale Republican ...”

“... Louis-Philippe as a beggar on horseback, but continued to contribute and to eat his hot meal. George III notoriously found ‘much sad stuff’ in Shakespeare and Professor Altick concedes that there was some sad stuff in Punch. Teasing Baron Rothschild as a ‘curly-headed Jew-boy’ and laying stress on Disraeli’s non-Aryan features were par for the ...”

“... The young Hector was brought up in Devonshire by two supposedly harsh, repressive aunts. Like George Orwell, he served briefly in the Burma police. Invalided out, he was next seen as a near-dandy and struggling writer in London, somewhat given to practical joking. He was also given to what his sister Ethel, who burned his letters after he died, called ...”

“... which Joan Didion attacked ‘the women’s movement’ in her famous breaking-eggs essay of 1972. George Clinton’s ‘cryptic nonsense’ on that album is neither difficult to hear nor to understand: ‘Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up. I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe – I was not ...”

“... closet Catholicism, republicanism, even as late as 1797 the antiquaries could be denounced by George III as a ‘Popish cabal’. Still, they stuck to the motto associated with their emblem, the bronze Lamp of Knowledge: non exstinguere, it ‘shall not be extinguished’. The Lamp, which is ‘curious’ – to use a favourite antiquarian adjective ...”

“... to the press, she threw a fine tantrum on conviction, prophesying the immediate fall of Lloyd George and revolution within a week. She was luckier than the scapegoated celebrity of World War Two, Ivor Novello, who was gaoled for a month for fiddling petrol for his Rolls-Royce. In those late months of World War One it looked as though Prince Lucio might be ...”

“... Venice that had not been said before, “including this statement”.’ The work of Gilbert and George he considers ‘as weary as some harmless sin’; the same pretty much goes for contemporary art in general: ‘So what if they were just snaps of someone jerking off in a leather armchair in an apartment in Zurich? Blow ’em up big enough and they looked ...”

“... can be described’ is porn. Lily, it seems, is a ‘creature of the middleworld’, an admirer of George Eliot who has ‘no patience with any work of fiction that strayed from the sternest social realism’; Keith, to begin with, assumes ‘that social realism would hold, here in Italy. And yet Italy itself seemed partly fabulous … He was, ominously, a K ...”

“... Oscar Wilde (with his quasi-Renaissance velvet suits), as well as the female cross-dresser (from George Sand to Marlene Dietrich). We learn of ‘The Anti-Neutral Suit’ in the Futurist Manifesto, which promised ‘three-dimensional colour acrobatics’, and the TuTa of 1919, an avant-garde adaptation of the utilitarian boiler suit that supposedly heralded ...”

“... of the name of Monro; and he told the story so often that he got the nickname of Tiger Conran’. George Downie (Downey), who died in Bengal in 1808, may have been equally keen to share it: in Travels in India a Hundred Years Ago (1893) Thomas Twining told of meeting in about 1800 a ‘Captain O’Donald’ who claimed to be one of those present at Munro’s ...”

“... finding instant and compelling evidence to prove he was a complete nightmare. Yet this book by George Jacobs, who was Sinatra’s valet for 15 years, might be understood to be wired in a whole new way: it is perhaps the ultimate diatribe by the disgruntled ex-staffer; a new high point (or low point) in a super-readable genre that should surely be given its ...”

“... by columns and arches, run through the centre of Tate Britain. They opened in 1937, shortly after George VI was crowned; along their length Nelson has hung a number of large dusty plaques bearing Commonwealth flags and the legend ‘Long May They Reign’. At their centre, instead of the regal ‘GR’, is the cursive ‘GE’ of General Electric. The ...”

“... yet we imagine it to be a thoroughly British habit. The painters are among the best observers, and Turner the grandest. Shortly before he died he was discovered on the floor of his sickroom in Cheyne Walk, having tried to reach the window and a view of the Thames. His doctor recalled how ‘the sun broke through the cloudy curtain which for so long had ...”

“... to factor in the need for a clean air act, or want to commiserate about the bad weather, as George VI did when he looked at John Piper’s drawings of Windsor Castle. You are struck by the observation of things that had not been seen before, or seen rarely, in pictures: things like the backs of the South London houses where Carel Weight set odd ...”

“... carefully to be believed. There is an extraordinary tract on Jewish self-hatred as delivered by George Ziad, a wealthy Palestinian who has been driven to espouse the Diasporist cause after years spent watching his people being mowed down by Israeli batons and bullets: the unassuageable guilt of the American émigrés who inadvertently abandoned their poor ...”