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“... that the Authorised Version of the Bible is a national and more than national treasure, never to be surpassed. And yet everyone we listen to, down to those who read the lessons in our parish church, proceeds on the assumption that this allegedly unsurpassable text can be, and needs to ...”

“... taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual. He made no preliminary drawings; when it came to finishing the figure a stand-in could take up the chosen position, usually a variation on a settled range of elegantly relaxed poses. Batoni, who was not cheap, was inclined to work ...”

“... in favour of stories of high adventure, in which the totally undeserving narrator gets mistaken by all for a hero and wins out every time, couldn’t fail to be a smart move. Flashman’s Lady is a good ten thousand places ahead of the most popular edition of Tom Brown’s Schooldays in the Amazon league, despite being ...”

“... of peace, the task of the government was again what it had been and what it would continue to be: how to hold it all together; how to create the illusion of national unity out of the fissiparous materials of an unequal society; even, how to prevent revolution. To an extent the common experience of austerity continued to bind people together. Rationing ...”

“... shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy. I do much more in Sedaris than quote Sedaris, much ...”

“... was quite natural in 1968, that year of wild crowds and top people’s plots. I was interviewed by a Swiss television team: ‘Don’t you think England might go Fascist, Mr Jones? A quiet English sort of Fascism?’ ‘Abs’lument pas!’ I snapped (quoting from a favourite French film), ‘Abs’lument pas!’ – with a confidence I could not muster ...”

“... head high in the civilised world. One might naturally take the heyday of this style of thinking to be the period between 1960 and 1980. Levels of economic growth in the early part of the period helped to build up a commitment to the welfare state and the social wage. Parallel with this was the expansion of Higher Education following the Robbins Report, and the ...”

“... part of the province’s culture. The first night, I sit up with the film’s director, David Hammond, adding bits to the script. We’re in the sunroom, as he calls it – a big glass-domed upstairs sitting-room at the back of his house. Purple summer dark, stars, streetlights climbing Divis, or the Black Mountain, as it’s called. We stare out at ...”

“... glibness revealed itself so plainly that I couldn’t bring myself to write the next day. Maybe by this time you know the tone I’m talking about?’ In yet another, an ageing actor researching his part in a semi-amateur production of Twelfth Night reads in ‘good old Granville-Barker’: ‘Feste, I feel, is not a young man … There runs through all he ...”

“... a contemporary of Goethe, who started off dealing antiquities in the Frankfurt ghetto; David Sassoon (1792-1864), heir to a distinguished Baghdadi-Jewish dynasty, who fled the political machinations of his hometown for British India; Joseph Evzel Gunzburg (1812-78), an alcohol magnate from Podolia with a prestigious rabbinic genealogy stretching ...”

“... a state assemblyman declared. ‘Brooklynites and New Yorkers of every race and religion should be concerned about their presence in our borough.’ The information on Barclays came from a book published in 1944: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. ‘In 1756,’ Williams wrote, ‘there were 84 Quakers listed as ...”

“... In​ 1975 David Bowie was in Los Angeles pretending to star in a film that wasn’t being made, adapted from a memoir he would never complete, to be called ‘The Return of the Thin White Duke’. This dubious pseudonymous character was first aired in an interview with Rolling Stone’s bumptious but canny young reporter Cameron Crowe; it soon became notorious ...”

“... Garth. I remember it was torturing my brain because a voice was saying: “Nikki, you are going to be all right, your mam’s waiting for you at your nana’s.” On a loudspeaker, over and over. “Your mam’s waiting for you, you are not going to get wrong.” And everything was going very fast, crowds and crowds of people shouting, and Nikki’s name ...”

“... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...”

“... or sample demonstrations of theoretical routines cried up as novelties. The series edited by Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield under the title ‘Cultural Polities’ has some twenty volumes in store already, covering popular fiction and music as well as canonical literature. Of these, the first four published titles present a mixed impression in ...”