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“... to lucid narration lies in a sentence found in the foreword to the present book: ‘Harold Evans, assisted by Oscar Turnill, read through the entire volume with a brilliant editorial eye; they taught me what skilled and intelligent editing can contribute to organisation and to lightening prose.’ Obviously the book’s main claim to attention must be ...”

“... photographs are memorable because the photographer has won a tug of war with the subject – Richard Avedon has described the process in his account of taking photographs of people picked out of the crowd in the American West. Unlike Avedon, McBean, who began his career as a mask-maker, didn’t look for cracks. His photographs don’t map social class ...”

“... which Dickens corrected for the first serialised-in-monthly-numbers issue, put out by Bradbury and Evans in 1849-50; volume versions prepared for the European and American markets; and three single-volume reprints, published by Chapman and Hall, and allegedly ‘carefully revised’ by Dickens. In her copious and lucid introduction to the Clarendon edition ...”

“... of actors. As he seeks to express it first in a letter to Cecil Beaton, then in one to Edith Evans, the matter provides a near operatic occasion on which to delineate – in exasperated parenthetical gasps, like sobs – the very meaning of kinship: It’s so hard to say what I feel – to have let down the whole side – the theatre, my friends, myself ...”

“... the House that ‘no useful purpose’ would be served by re-opening the inquiry into the Timothy Evans case. This was despite a passionate appeal from Sir Frank Soskice, who said in 1961: ‘My appeal to the Home Secretary is most earnest. I believe that if ever there was a debt due to justice and to the reputation both of our own judicial system and to the ...”

“... perjury in 1999 he has written books about himself and other public figures who fell from grace: Richard Nixon, his former special counsel Charles Colson, and John Newton, the Anglican hymn-writer who once captained slave ships. Nazarbayev’s life story doesn’t have this trajectory. It is 19 years since he became his republic’s leader and his rise has ...”

“... It employed no reporters – news items were prepared from Reuter’s agency copy – until Richard Dimbleby, a reporter on Southampton’s evening newspaper, applied for a job with a bold letter suggesting that some members of the news staff might be called ‘BBC reporters or BBC correspondents’ and ‘held in readiness, just as are the evening ...”

“... of the valley precipitated the election of the nationalist Plaid Cymru’s first MP, Gwynfor Evans, in 1966. That same year, the village of Aberfan in South Wales was partially submerged when Tip 7 at the Merthyr Vale colliery collapsed, sending a deluge of spoil from the local mines down the hillside, destroying several houses and the primary ...”

“... culprit than did the exertions of Scotland Yard in 1888’, but he is unduly dismissive of Stewart Evans and Paul Gainey’s The Lodger: The Arrest and Escape of Jack the Ripper (1995). This indicts a ferocious misogynist, Francis Tumblety (c.1833-1903), an American quack who peddled a patent medicine known as the Tumblety Pimple Destroyer. (He was arrested ...”

“... and a white-haired/eyebrowed/moustachioed, black-coated Supreme Court Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes. There’s Harpo again, this time with cotton-wool locks, alongside his brothers – Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three faces ...”

“... End. On the strength of it, he was later asked by Truth to review a book about the case of Timothy Evans, hanged after his wife and baby daughter had been found murdered at 10 Rillington Place, West London, an address later notorious as the home of the mass murderer John Christie. The same Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, by now a ‘charlatan’ with ‘all the ...”

“... true celebrity ‘delivers’. He or she keeps weaving and moving in an effort not to disappoint. Richard Nixon was such a one. Every time a new segment of Watergate tape was released, revealing his Jew-baiting or thuggery or corruption, he would publish a new book on grand strategy or at least fly to Beijing. What a trouper! Such a pro! Say what you like ...”

“... of scooter-borne rock fans, draped in the ambiguous insignia of RAF targets and Union Jacks. What Richard Weight calls the ‘very British style’ of Mod found its initial foothold in late 1950s Soho with the arrival of the jazz ‘modernists’, who defined themselves in strict opposition to the reigning gatekeepers of Trad. Modernists were wilfully ...”

“... humility, and varying tensions between private and public religious experience. These include Abel Evans, Elizabeth Rowe, Aaron Hill and Joseph Trapp, and even Robert Lowth, whose The Genealogy of Christ (1729) was written when he was still a schoolboy at Winchester, and the much-derided Sir Richard Blackmore. Johnson later ...”

“... publishing (for an unnamed but unmistakable Faber, down to the Kundera lookalike chairman, Matthew Evans). After ten or fifteen years, she leaves London and moves to Devon with her daughter, where she begins to write. As Lowell said, ‘Why not say what happened?’ Or, from this book, a nod at Knausgaard: ‘What’s the point in making things up? the ...”