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“... wrote, ‘for heaven’s sake keep clear of this town, unless you have an awful lot of money.’ Robin Redgrave was frantically trying to stave off bankruptcy and praying that Micheline’s lifelong friendship with Rica Antonescu, wife of the general-dictator, might afford the family some protection. At 11 p.m. on 9 February 1941, the telephone rang in their ...”

“... and sports are by no means all boastful or complicit. The supreme text of recent years is James Fox’s account of Lord Lucan and his set, with their boffes de politesse. There is a touch of Lucanian zombiness in The Monument, and the peer himself takes part in The Passion of John Aspinall. Patrician insolence has quite often appeared to express a ...”

“... caught out in an instance of hypocrisy or an effort at misdirection, has weighty BBC pedigree in Robin Day. But in the hands of its modern practitioners it is a tool blunted by frequent use, unlikely to coax from its subject much in the way of truth but more in the way of evasion, or fireworks at best. It perhaps reinforces the unstated message of much ...”

“... his occasional quotations from Wordsworth. A famous photograph shows him in country clothes with a robin perched on his hat. This lifelong rusticity led many to label him an insular amateur of limited ambition. As incoming prime minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman was reluctant to make Grey foreign secretary because of ‘his ignorance of foreign ...”

“... Wiertz is hardly an old master, about suffering he wasn’t wrong either. 25 June. As I leave Robin Hope’s birthday party at the Old Sessions House in Clerkenwell Square someone says that England scored in the first minute against Portugal. The pubs I pass seem oddly subdued, with none of the usual crowds spilling out onto the pavement or the roars from ...”

“... less eliminating women from both the class and the cause. It has recently been argued by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, in Feminism without Illusions that feminism when cultivated as ‘sisterhood’ is in danger of eluding class realities: ‘Sisterhood invokes non-political relations ... In so doing it missed the point ... feminist politics of the personal ...”

“... of them was when she was putting paint on. A few years before she died she went in for a Reliant Robin (to put more of her things in). It was actually yellow to start with, but that didn’t save it from an additional coat which she applied as Monet might have done, standing back to judge the effect of each brush-stroke. The Reliant stood outside my gate. It ...”

“... where he quickly made three more shorts, continued his writing as a critic, found work in the Fox publicity department and made a number of contacts in the French film industry. His breakthrough came in the annus mirabilis of 1959 when Breathless rocketed him to instant success. The foundations had already been laid by friends from the Cahiers gang ...”

“... in future be preserved under state ownership. Oakham’s Crown Hotel, where Goldring provoked some fox-hunters into a ferocious argument about the death penalty, is now gone. Not so the railway station which, with its level crossing and dag-edged canopy, might belong in a watercolour painted by Edward Ardizzone for Graham Greene’s children’s story The ...”

“... the prime minister complained that this was the wrong approach: ‘When my gamekeeper shoots a fox, he doesn’t go and hang it up outside the Master of Foxhounds’ drawing room; he buries it out of sight.’ To which Hollis might legitimately have replied that some gamekeepers had the sense to hang the vermin they had shot on the nearest fence to warn ...”

“... over English schools’. But by then the soundbites had gone round the world and back again – Fox News claimed Birmingham was a ‘no-go zone’ for non-Muslims, and that Birmingham’s schools were in crisis, especially Park View. Trustees resigned, staff resigned, others are still suspended pending disciplinary hearings. Pupils had cameras stuffed into ...”