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“... of the nation address, he was grabbed by the scruff of his jacket by SABC’s head of news, Jimi Matthews, told not to get Matthews ‘into shit’ and ordered to put together soundbites of opposition politicians’ positive reactions to Zuma’s speech. He refused (even had he wished to, he could hardly have complied as ...”

“... that he despises them. I tried, perhaps, to curry favour, as my weakness is. L was adamant. Then we were offered a ticket for the Cup Tie, to see which Graves has come to London after six years. No, I don’t think he’ll write great poetry: but what will you? His mother was indeed a Von Ranke; his Anglo-Irish father famous in his time for many things ...”

“... for another constituency in the event of a general election, wanted money and love, in that order. We know it was in that order because he says so. Students of Disraeli, and of the historical difficulty of deciding what is peculiar about him, will have to attend now to the letter of 7 February 1839, where he speaks frankly of his priorities and yet casts ...”

“... Cape Y2K once safely rounded, and we shall be faced in short order by 2002, a date that stands suggestively out to the numerological eye as a palindrome. We’re allowed only one of these amphisbaenic years per century, though we lived through the last of them a bare eight-some ago, in 1991 ...”

“... or envies men from rival dormitories. Such is the gang spirit. Then, in our teens or twenties, we entered the mob, post-war conscripts in the years of National Service: here the public schoolboys came into their own, hogging the Queen’s Commission and acquiring conscript valets. Trevor Royle, a serious young Scot, describes ‘the National Service ...”

“... Wednesday, for example, was the result of an act of real folly committed in the face of all that we know about the British economy. It was probably the worst mistake in British public policy since the Second World War yet not one of those responsible – ministers or civil servants – ever accepted responsibility, let alone thought of resigning, an ...”

“... of rampant soccer cred, have been a slow torment for the antique soccer bore. In the old days we were friendless and perhaps despised but we enjoyed a steady faith in our own expertise, our strength-in-depth: we knew the lot. The depressing thing about these new-wave chaps is that ...”

“... Scottish Conservative conference in March, May issued what sounded to some Scots like a threat: ‘We must take this opportunity to bring our United Kingdom closer together.’ She stressed the need for measures that would maintain ‘the coherence and integrity’ of the UK. New Labour’s ‘devolution settlements’, she warned, ‘were designed in 1998 ...”

“... It was clear to him that he’d stumbled across it. Returning to London in 1955, he married Mary Matthews, a secretary at the Daily Express (the first of their three children was born the following year), and began sending his work to Carnell, who not only accepted it for publication but obligingly found him a day job as an assistant editor at British ...”

“... was an ideal anthology for a sixth-form prize on Speech Day. Here were Scott’s lieutenants: W.T. Arnold, grandson of Arnold of Rugby; L.T. Hobhouse, social philosopher and member of a Liberal dynasty; and Herbert Sidebotham, sent on a scholarship to Balliol but as Lancashire as his name. Here was Scott himself, presiding over the paper with robust ...”

“... was already second nature. Coming in to the movement a little later, I did the same thing myself. We knew just what we were doing and when the foreign visitor – Anthony Sampson, if you like – left the room, we relaxed immediately into more Marxist language and far more of a Party ...”

“... useful as a literary-biographical Rorschach test. There is a frustrating conundrum about the Bard: we know quite a lot about his life, but none of what we know seems to tell us anything. This causes people to project all sorts of theories and fantasies onto him, which in turn was what led Samuel Schoenbaum to publish his ...”

“... struggles in Vietnam, Cuba, Chile and Nicaragua; and the hope that in the Spanish experience we might find ‘the idealism and sacrifice so singularly absent from modern politics’. The idea that it was ‘the last great cause’ is echoed in the reminiscences of the international volunteers quoted in Richard Baxell’s exhaustive study, Unlikely ...”

“... makes fascinating use of documents that are either unfamiliar or heretofore unpublished. So we fall upon a startlingly sexy note written by Virginia to Leonard a year and a half after their marriage, in which the Mandril [Leonard Woolf’s pet name for Virginia] ‘wishes me to inform you delicately that her flanks and rump are now in finest ...”

“... most likely somewhere in Africa around 400,000 years ago, the planet was set on a new course. We have little idea and even less evidence of how early humans made fire; perhaps they carried around smouldering bundles of leaves from forest fires, or captured the sparks thrown off when chipping stone or rubbing sticks together. However it happened, the human ...”