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“... are in Shead; the Angus Morrison unpublished chapter made available to Shead and the Anthony Powell memoir which prefaced Shead’s book are re-quarried. And Motion never cites references – a major irritation of this biography without bibliography. Constant’s life-story is told with gusto, nevertheless. The brilliant conversationalist and punster ...”

“... of them might have weakened under Derby’s persuasion, but Cranborne, rather like Enoch Powell in the Thorneycroft-Powell-Birch resignations of 1958, implacably drove them on.’ On Gladstone’s prime ministerial management of his cabinet: ‘While it is difficult to believe that he emulated Attlee’s laconicism ...”

“... forthrightly defend American empire as an exercise of raw power, while traditional liberals like Michael Ignatieff promote it as a way of protecting human rights against tyrannical regimes. Perhaps the leading current populariser of the idea is Niall Ferguson. Only an American empire, he insists, can secure order in a dangerous, unruly world. He does not ...”

“... a magnificent folly, a film made frenziedly, a fabrication of breakdowns and benzedrine. Much as Powell and Pressburger re-created India in Pinewood for Black Narcissus, GWTW represents the triumph of artifice, the South of the 1860s concocted on a Hollywood lot. While the book was an ante-modernist throwback, a 1930s riposte to Harriet Beecher Stowe, the ...”

“... It is clear that Benn has the same sentimental attitude to Parliament that we associate with Michael Foot and Enoch Powell. But ‘Parliamentary sovereignty’ is one of the polite fictions of modern Britain: it permits the executive, judiciary and bureaucracy to do whatever they wish – usually in secret ...”

“... Apollo in 1976. In France, ‘Curval’s name is as well-known as Frank Herbert’s in America or Michael Moorcock’s in Britain.’ Brave Old World transports us to ‘Marcom’ – the EEC as it will have developed in the late 21st century. Britain is apparently still in. But since the whole action takes place where France used to be, we are not yet the ...”

“... in 1982 after the invasion of the Falkland Islands, don’t happen very often. More recently, Michael Howard’s reluctance as home secretary to accept blame for the failures of the prison service introduced some new distinctions into the concept of ministerial responsibility. In 1995 Howard sacked Derek Lewis, the director-general of the prison ...”

“... long.Margaret: Yes. Very.Plomley died in harness in 1985 after 1786 episodes. He was succeeded by Michael Parkinson, twenty years younger and an experienced TV chat show host, who found the experience bruising and left after two years. In his autobiography, Parkinson says that Plomley’s widow, Diana (who’d wanted Plomley’s old friend John Mortimer to ...”

“... Geoffrey Fisher, called on Macmillan to tell him that whatever he did, he must not appoint Michael Ramsey as his successor, adding that he knew Ramsey well, had indeed been his headmaster at Repton. ‘Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice,’ Macmillan replied. ‘You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.’ Some years ...”

“... A mystique of language for its own sake is the power source and the danger of Modernism. Michael Schmidt’s five American poets avoid (the best of their work avoids) both abstractions. The language has a life of its own and a life in relation to a recognisable real world, as in James McMichael’s ‘Compline’: Gudique is the chastening. She is ...”

“... to any single position. Its founding members included proto-Thatcherite free marketeers like Enoch Powell and Angus Maude alongside consensual modernisers sceptical of market-based solutions like Iain Macleod and Edward Heath. The diversity has continued: later members have included ostensible one-nation Tories – Kenneth Clarke, ...”

“... a layer of enigmatic stardust over films I wouldn’t otherwise have been interested in, such as Michael Winner’s Lawman or the Danny La Rue vehicle Our Miss Fred – or, indeed, David Essex’s Stardust. These films were out of reach, but only just out of reach. Forbidden fruit hanging almost low enough to be plucked.I knew that I wanted to read Offbeat ...”

“... into its territory. We had missed each other in New York and Los Angeles, but eventually met at Michael Powell’s memorial service. (He said he would probably not have made GoodFellas, but Powell had picked up the script and said how good it was.) Scorsese liked Donnie Brasco very much, pointed out the differences ...”

“... to spare him a confrontation with the truth. ‘If Philip hadn’t been drugged,’ his friend Michael Bowen remembered, ‘he would have been raving. He was that frightened.’Larkin’s letters are full of references to his fear of death, some humorous, some grimly foreboding. In November 1982 he wrote to Motion about a dinner held for Thatcher by the ...”

“... as Eric Heffer I am inclined to suspect Sisson of being almost as narrow-church as Enoch Powell. C.H. Sisson writes of Richard Hooker in a ‘Little-Englander’ way. He says that Hooker was ‘the classic apologist of the Church of England’. (Sisson’s italics.) It is (claims Sisson) ‘not a sect, but the historic heir of the medieval ...”