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“... trustees would not countenance an agnostic headmaster. Mary Ward intervened. Her publisher, George Smith, enriched by Elsmere and its successors, was the proprietor of the Cornhill Magazine. Thanks to Mrs Ward’s influence, Leonard was taken on in 1901. He would eventually become editor.Released from her matron’s duties at Charterhouse, Julia took out a ...”

“... the judgment to be made about the wisdom of the Emperor’s diplomatic move. Interestingly enough. Anthony Mockler, with his detailed work on Italian sources, is inclined to endorse Evelyn Waugh’s emphatically held opinion that Haile Selassie was very ill-advised to go public over Walwal since it was this that drove the Duce to go over the top. On the other ...”

“... thought him ‘a dark horse’, withdrawn and laconic; the younger poet and apprentice producer, Anthony Thwaite, remembered sharing an office with MacNeice in the late Fifties, when he was drinking heavily, as a far from comfortable experience: Uncertain of your mood, after an hour Of a shared office going slowly sour With cigarettes and hangovers, the ...”

“... star in films by Lubitsch and Cukor to the troubling singularity of the violent heroes of Anthony Mann’s Westerns and Hitchcock’s thrillers – an impressive plurality of the films of the 1950s that have lasted because they have psychological depth. Two other front-rank directors who favoured him were Frank Capra and John Ford: Capra served ...”

“... Does Britain need a written constitution? Of course it does, which is why, as Anthony King points out at the start of this readable and illuminating book, it has one already. Whatever its detractors might think, Britain is not some folkloric society governed according to immemorial custom on the nod and the wink of the people in the know ...”

“... these basic mythemes into their own forms of ‘poetic space’ or ‘heroic memory’, as Anthony Smith terms them in his fundamental study of The Ethnic Origins of Nations. In a moving passage, Braudel confessed his passion for France, but promised to put it aside in his book. He characteristically added: ‘It is possible that it will play ...”

“... applied art and romantic landscape, and of what now looks like late Post-Impressionism – Matthew Smith, Duncan Grant, Frances Hodgkins, Victor Pasmore – there were more eccentric talents of various sizes, like Stanley Spencer and David Jones, who were very English (or very Welsh) and not international at all. In drawings of wrapped sculpture in landscape ...”

“... in the past as those files of the Spectator where he found the famous pieces by J.D. Scott and Anthony Hartley, or the scripts of John Wain’s Third Programme magazine First Reading, or copies of the Reading limited editions of Wain and Amis. Mr Morrison claims to have eschewed gossip and attended instead to such questions as: ‘Did the writers know each ...”

“... In Anthony Burgess’s latest novel, Earthly Powers, there is a parody of a Betjeman poem. Thus kneeling at the altar rail We ate the word’s white papery wafer. Here, so I thought, desire must fail, My chastity be never safer. But then I saw your tongue protrude To catch the wisp of angel’s food. In a brilliant piece of word play the angel food cake of the children’s tea-party becomes the Host: sex, worship and childhood come together on the tip of the darting tongue that demurely holds it ...”

“... classes, to personify ‘old Labour’ and they were having none of it. His replacement by John Smith changed everything. In the months following Kinnock’s resignation everything crumbled: the Tory vote collapsed, the Liberal vote collapsed with it and great waves of former Alliance voters headed back to Labour under ...”

“... one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ‘the ...”

“... minister in British history has surrendered power quite so limply, none more ignominiously except Anthony Eden after Suez.Like Eden, Rosebery was a golden boy (both were made foreign secretary at the age of 38). Adoring crowds followed him throughout his career. Leo McKinstry in this excellent new biography makes a case for him being the first modern ...”

“... to think – they bring about a new kind of social order: a ‘division of labour’, as Adam Smith called it, which fosters individual innovation and specialisation, and directs scarce resources where society needs them most. The problems affecting a mature capitalist system are obvious (trade cycles, unemployment, inflation and constant upheaval), but ...”

“... his own turf. The writers he likes pose little or no threat – Elizabeth Taylor, Elizabeth Bowen, Anthony Powell: either safely senior or safely underrated by the mob. Philip Larkin used to exhibit the same tendency when asked to name his lineup: Barbara Pym, Stevie Smith, Betjeman. Larkin, of course, is the one ...”

“... in New York exist, men with names like Antonio ‘Tony Ducks’ Corallo of the Lucchese, or Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno of the Genovese. The hundreds of corpses left on mean streets in Palermo, Naples or Brooklyn exist too. But is there a Mafia with rules and regulations, based on secret initiation rites, linked by ceremonies and blood oaths? Dr ...”