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“... seemed to understand that stories have their own needs and immutable trajectories. Diana told Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story that she would never be queen. In 1992 I reviewed the Morton book for this paper and mocked her prediction: ‘The premonition is never quite explained. Does she think that death is beckoning, or divorce, or is she planning ...”

“... History. The fate of the Canadian Indians, too, is largely ignored in these pages, though Ged Martin, in a chapter on Canada after 1815, admits that the 19th century was ‘a disaster’ for its indigenous peoples: ‘They had constituted at least one-fifth of the population in 1815 but by 1911 their total members halved to just over 100,000, barely 1 per ...”

“... of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old boyfriends. But we also think of the places in Britain where the cars were built, places ...”

“... the bar to his appeal. The 1960s were everywhere at this Convention, in references to Vietnam and Martin Luther King, but also in notions of protest and togetherness. A priest stood up in the Cathedral Church of St Paul’s in Tremont Street. ‘Don’t let people rob us of a legacy,’ he said. ‘That religion and progressiveness can be something not just ...”

“... he says of one of the Femintern members, sounding less like a Parisian intellectual than a Martin Amis hero. Will, however, is married to a psychoanalyst of East European origin, who lives in France and teaches in New York. He is the friend of Paul Fals (the ‘Trotsky of psychoanalysis’), Laurence Lutz (a philosopher who strangles his wife) and Jean ...”

“... correlatives in literature’ – in Malcolm Bradbury, as it isn’t perhaps needless to say, and Martin Amis. Perhaps there is wisdom in Howard Brenton’s observation that what binds us together in this period is nothing more than ‘a profound unease’. It is here, approaching the end of his study, that Appleyard chooses, or is compelled, to make some ...”

“... and dialect and fold on the page; even the wonderful Rose, Green, Red etc Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, on which Angela Carter was brought up, and which she invokes as her model, have their tedious moments, perhaps because the ladies Lang employed to collect and transcribe improved them in the modest fashion of the day, erasing some of the raunchiness ...”

“... He will tell us nothing of real interest about his wives, mistresses or kids (although he chucks Martin the odd walk-on here and there), or about any living loved-ones – a species defined by him as those who have emotional claims on me’. He doesn’t want to hurt types like these, he says, or hurt them any more than he already has (mind your own ...”

“... head west for about 40 kilometres into the Gaeltacht: we’re to have lunch with an old friend, Andrew, in the Beehive Bar near the coast. He’s there in the car-park having a smoke. I manage to refuse his offer of a Sweet Afton, and as I do so he notices my copy of Dean Godson’s biography of David Trimble, Himself Alone, lying in the back seat with ...”

“... history’ of Edda and saga, perhaps especially in England though more ominously elsewhere. Andrew Wawn prefaces his collection with a 19th-century sketch of the great translator Sir George Webbe Dasent: Of Herculean height and strength ... he resembled a Viking of old, and such I conceive he at times supposed himself to be ... He was two gentlemen at ...”

“... Passage’ (Folio Society, £39.95) The first Englishman to try to navigate this route was Martin Frobisher, privateer, adventurer and blagger extraordinaire, who set sail from Gravesend in June 1576 with 34 men in three lightly equipped and, as Williams puts it, ‘alarmingly small’ boats. The expedition was financed by a group of 18 investors who ...”

“... Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the euro during the current Parliament was taken. Aware of the increase in Euroscepticism from Philip Gould’s focus groups and daily readings of the Sun and the Mail, Gordon ...”

“... Kegan Paul, Trench and Trübner. Chatto and Windus began in the 1870s as a partnership between Andrew Chatto who had drive, and W.E. Windus, a minor poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of ...”

“... Best Screenplay Adaptation, and is still a critical favourite. The same screenwriting team plus Andrew Solt wrote Mervyn LeRoy’s 1949 remake, with June Allyson as Jo, Janet Leigh as Meg, Elizabeth Taylor as Amy and Margaret O’Brien as Beth. Peter Lawford played a glamorous Laurie – indeed, the screenplay describes Laurie as looking ‘not unlike our ...”

“... been murdered here: a mobile shop blown up; two community policemen shot; a girl called Bernadette Martin with a Protestant boyfriend shot in the middle of the night. There had been more than 120 deaths in this town since the start of the Troubles. ‘Nobody trusts the police,’ he said. ‘There’s even a credibility gap between the RUC and the Protestant ...”