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“... arrogant display of budget that speaks of royal visitations, the finish of the London Marathon, or John Major on walkabout, prospecting for inner-city blight. But on this unearned, mint morning, the fuss is all about real royalty, indigenous royalty: one of our local princes of darkness, a cashmere colonel, is about to be boxed. A mob of expectant necrophiles ...”

“... the 20-year-old actor Gabriel Spencer instead of being killed by him), but Thomas Middleton and John Fletcher both died in their mid-forties, Francis Beaumont at thirty, while Henry Porter (whose Two Angry Women of Abingdon influenced The Merry Wives of Windsor) may have been still younger when he was killed in a duel by ...”

“... of poems edited by a Conservative MP. My first surprise was to find James Prior and Geoffrey Howe coming up the stairs behind me. Then I found that all the poets had been given red roses to wear, to distinguish them from the politicians. This was hardly necessary, since most of the politicians looked like T.S. Eliot and most of the poets looked like ...”

“... an anchor of certainty and principle that it would be physically painful to haul it in. Listen to John Berger, tending the authentic mulch of pig earth and keeping his ear close to his own well-manured ground, as he instructed the readers of the Guardian on 25 February: The Rushdie affair has already cost several human lives and threatens to cost many, many ...”

“... Like all the best whodunnits, it is a slow burner. A group of clever young men – Oliver Letwin, John Redwood, William Waldegrave, among others – gather in various restaurants and country house hotels to bat around ideas for reforming the financing of local governance, encouraged and provoked by their mentor, Lord Rothschild. They were much clearer about ...”

“... and called and texted Tom Scholar, the permanent secretary at the Treasury. He also contacted John Glen and Jesse Norman, two MPs who had served under him and were now ministers in Sunak’s department.Despite Cameron’s efforts – and at least ten meetings with Treasury officials – Greensill wasn’t given access to the CCFF scheme, but it did ...”

“... of the old, generous, socially concerned Conservatism that Margaret Thatcher destroyed and neither John Major nor William Hague has done anything to re-create. While most other believers in this brand of Toryism, not only from Heath’s generation but the next two, have slipped away, to the House of Lords and points east, this old, old man, 83 next ...”

“... history. The chapter on CIA infiltration of the art world is riddled with howlers (that John Hay Whitney had his ‘own’ museum is one among several mistakes of this sort), but the gist of her argument about Abstract Expressionism and its uses as propaganda is correct, if not wholly original. Who Paid the Piper? is even so a major work of ...”

“... countryman Mr Wm Shak would procure us monei … I will like of as I shall heare when & wheare & howe.’ Some fifty yards further along Carter Lane a curving street slopes down to the left: this marks the eastern boundary of the monastic precinct. It is now called St Andrew’s Hill but in Shakespeare’s day was known less salubriously as Puddle Wharf ...”

“... it off – was the windfall tax on profits imposed in 1981 by Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe. (Blair or Brown would never dream of doing anything like that to the City.) But the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the increasingly international flow of capital, combined with the abolition of restrictions on trading practices which culminated ...”

“... our premier’s now just a grainy blue-grey like television?’ The image of Sir Geoffrey Howe providing ‘some solid weight’ has a nice irony today. But Oliver is not content, à la Baudrillard, to stay at the simulated surface: he seeks to retain the distinction between true and false pearls, to expose the falsity of Thatcherism (and some ...”

“... of US-Soviet relations, complete with a speech by Olivia de Havilland … The next day, John Wayne learns that the Selective Service board has extended his 3-A deferment. Hot dog! The star celebrates Thanksgiving Day by carving turkeys at the canteen, even as Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin meet in Tehran to plan the US invasion of Europe. The ...”

“... type of lordly self-belief, nor with the obsessive thirst for fame that motivated a poet like John Berryman. His literary career is often compared pityingly with their astute professionalism, as if, authentic poète maudit though he was, he never quite got the marketing right. Certainly he never managed to create out of his sufferings the suspense of a ...”

“... application, always tied, seldom happily, to a university department, and agonising over a book. John Updike, who had a modest two wives and wrote 63 books, was, in a way, worldlier and more comfortable, finding nests at the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books that he never left. These writers are dead now, and the only thing that can be said with ...”

“... must be acute. The centre cannot hold, things fall apart And everybody ends up in the cart. Howe’s budget pacifies the Tory Wets, And at the same time seems fine to the Drys. In other words, the PM’s hedged her bets If only for the breathing space it buys While everyone who’s got a job forgets Roy Jenkins once was roughly twice as wise A ...”