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“... Entry for 18 April 1986, Not Many Dead The success of Michael Moore’s film about Roger Smith and General Motors has aroused an envious spirit of emulation in my breast. ‘Conrad and Me’, a script which I hone and burnish in slack moments, has the following points of mild interest. In the summer of 1985, I wrote an article for the Spectator about ...”

“... security. Mexico, the largest and wealthiest of them, has come closest. Mexico, says Peter Smith, in his chapter in the Cambridge History, ‘stands out as a paragon of political stability within Latin America’. There have been no serious efforts to produce political destabilisation, either from without or from within, since the Revolution of ...”

“... portraits of the Thirties (and, if there were more space, a related de Kooning and ideally a John Graham too, but at all events one such Gorky). Rosenthal’s view was that ‘in no way’ could such a painting be ‘described as one of the most central works of 20th-century American art. Gorky’s significance was to come later, in the last few years of his ...”

“... scout who spotted Kate Moss on a plane would have thought much the same as the painter Graham Robertson when he noticed Langtry walking past Apsley House. Lillie began her career as muse, model and archetype to the likes of Millais, Whistler, Burne-Jones, Watts and Poynter within the month. Society was just as quick to take her up. Vanity Fair ...”

“... books on diction and syntax were respectfully received. At the end of the decade an academic, Graham Hough, spelt out in his Image and Experience the view that modernism was an interruption of the native tradition, cogently questioning the method by which Eliot and Pound claimed to have built structures dependent upon a ‘logic of ...”

“... habit of sending comp copies to anyone who might be interested. Kathy Acker, Gaston Bachelard, Graham Greene, Karl Popper: all responded appreciatively on receiving a Gaberbocchus in the post. Admirers were as likely to be eminently establishment as anti-establishment. Jean Dubuffet invited the Themersons for tea in Provence; the philosopher Elizabeth ...”

“... obliged to surrender themselves as their second step to sobriety, is manifestly the deity of Billy Graham and Jeanette Winterson’s mother. AA has always been an aggressively evangelical movement. The 12th and final step, of carrying the message to the ‘alcoholic who still suffers’, imposes the role of proselyte on every active member (if I were ...”

“... full colonels had joined up in the 18th century). The otherwise tolerably rational ” Sir James Graham, First Lord of the Admiralty, thought fighting alongside the French was ‘unnatural’ and refused to allow British ships to carry French troops. The prime minister, Lord Aberdeen, had expected war with France rather than Russia. Neither he nor Gladstone ...”

“... in what is given to few writers and poor in what is given to most men’. Martin Seymour-Smith, reviewing Laughter in the Dark, described Nabokov as ‘a kind of Satanic Mantovani, coming into cruel close-up on your screens at the end of the compelling torment to ask (the question mark ironic): “You have been distressed by my music, you ...”

“... but, in any case, he did not want to get involved. He wrote to his friend R.B. Cunninghame Graham: He is a Protestant Irishman, pious too. But so was Pizarro. For the rest I can assure you that he is a limpid personality. There is a touch of the conquistador in him too; for I have seen him start off into an unspeakable wilderness swinging a ...”

“... that he had had a homosexual relationship). We should also not forget David Trevinnick and Graham Riddick, suspended from their jobs as Parliamentary Private Secretaries over allegations that they had each accepted £1000 in return for tabling Parliamentary written questions. The same ‘cash for questions’ controversy also later accounted for two ...”

“... in the 1930s sense, since the pulse of Orwell’s earlier fiction runs right through it. Winston Smith is a latter-day version of Gordon Comstock from Keep the Aspidistra Flying, stuck in a dead-end job (obliterating evidence that conflicts with the new version of history being put out by the Party) and living in a flat which is a futuristic version of the ...”

“... of Gordon McMaster, the MP for Paisley South, and the boorishness of his alleged tormentor, Tommy Graham, the MP for neighbouring West Renfrewshire; the irregularities associated with the Govan consituency represented by Mohammad Sarwar MP (now cleared in the courts of criminal malpractice); the local government scandals associated with Paisley, East ...”

“... modern art culture – Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Krasner, Hans Hofmann, the sculptor David Smith – which had spent a decade submitting to the master. ‘Aha,’ Gorky is supposed to have said coldly to de Kooning on first being shown the younger artist’s Picasso-saturated work, ‘so you have ideas of your own.’ Picasso’s aren’t good enough ...”

“... that it was altogether too free-form. I rather wish it had been more so, and done on the lines of Graham Norton’s current TV show, so that the priest in charge could have said: ‘All sit ... but remain standing those who had any sort of fling with the deceased.’15 May. Finish reading A Pacifist’s War by Frances Partridge and start reading Stalingrad ...”