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“... mixture of pride and embarrassment. From being ‘innocent and warm-hearted’ when she arrived in London in 1959, she became, she explained to her son Seymour, as he was growing up, ‘wild and naughty’. But she emphatically denies ever being ‘the common tart’ she was painted as. She was not, she insists, a prostitute ‘in the sense that most people ...”

“... dress to a middle-management standard.) Reg was, as Tony acknowledges, ‘one of the smartest men London ever turned out’. But Ron, the younger twin? There he was, large as life, out and about in his own manor, wearing ‘slacks and an open-necked shirt’. He didn’t have a tie! That was the moment. The tickle of ice on the spine. Put it down to executive ...”

“... oh – grandiosity – had he not lived in Port Mungo.’ The grandiose one is Gin’s brother, Jack, the protagonist of Port Mungo. He is first seen as an intense young man, from a Suffolk dynasty so posh it has a family curse and a private tutor to teach the children ‘German literature and Irish history’. Jack is ...”

“... enlarge the psychological potential of the novel. He has nothing in common with Rider Haggard or Jack London. Stevenson’s imagination was filled with the uncanny. He was always aware of his ‘unseen collaborator’, his unconscious, and his prostrations with illness were part of a larger entanglement with mortality. The illnesses will always define ...”

“... but he wasted his talents in pursuit of hopeless right-wing causes and never made the cabinet. Jack, the elder son, was an unpleasant psychopath from his earliest years and, after a career of unbroken disreputability, ended up in France in 1940, and did a deal with the devil. Hence the awful drama of November 1942, when the family of Speak-for-England ...”

“... you think you’re enlightened, go spend a weekend with your parents,’ Bob Walker said to Stein. Jack Warner was the type of man whom Stein’s father might have thought of as a business legend. Here’s Dennis Hopper: I was very young in 1955, when Warner Brothers did Rebel without a Cause – 18 or 19 years old. We’d started shooting in black and ...”

“... General McClellan Pride, questioner, and pride’s obverse, fear; Fear of failure. The Times of London Noted my Air of Success. Our grand Potomac army loved me as I’d planned. I was Napoleon. I snubbed Lincoln. Think if I’d obeyed him: one swift strike, Rebellion over, slavery intact, Oneself in office ... I couldn’t act ...”

“... all because of our fucking surname,’ exclaimed the exasperated Valerie Hobson, the wife of Jack Profumo, when ‘the Profumo scandal’ was resurrected many years after the event. And perhaps she was right, though that cannot be the reason for their son, David Profumo, once more resurrecting it. Presumably he needed to get it out of his ...”

“... the British war films that I had been fed on as a schoolboy (Kenneth More, Dirk Bogarde and Jack Hawkins equipped with Tootal cravats and stiff upper lips against the might of the Nazi war machine) and the often uncritical television documentaries and nostalgic Second World War books that are still produced, as opposed to the stories that I heard when I ...”

“... Street tabloids, the sleek lines of Odeon cinemas and Frank Pick’s designer revamping of the London Underground. Avant-gardes, in other words, only count when their stylistic inventions, isolated and sanitised, begin to permeate the existing structures. Such a dogmatic Fabianism in cultural politics makes it natural for LeMahieu to award the ...”

“... Elizabeth Pepys and her husband, Sam, rose early and walked from their house behind the Tower of London down Seething Lane. They were to visit one of Sam’s superiors, William Batten, surveyor of the navy. The custom was that women should take the first man they saw as their Valentine, so long as he was no relation. The previous year, Elizabeth had selected ...”

“... Jack​ could be a handful after lunch, so I always made a point of getting things off to a positive start.‘Do you know what I’m going to do if you have a good lesson today?’ I asked him.‘Will you buy me a beer, sir?’ he replied.I laughed. Jack was 15. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘but you’re not allowed to tell your parents ...”

“... Lost World (1912), the explorer John Roxton is recognisably based on Fawcett, whose lectures in London Doyle had attended. He had ‘something of Don Quixote’, Doyle wrote, ‘and yet again something which was the essence of the English country gentleman’, and though his eyes twinkled there lurked in them a ‘capacity for furious wrath and implacable ...”

“... those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law. Andrew Jack points out that Vladimir Putin belongs to a special, transitional generation. He was ‘born too late to share any of the Bolsheviks’ original ideals or struggles, but too soon to be fully inculcated with the culture of corruption and chaos which took hold ...”

“... was awaiting the last, and I fancy it was also the first, train of the day to leave Exeter for London. The set was furnished with an entire county’s Sunday newspapers. Local lawyers were carousing in the ladies’ room. A mother and child who had come from London to visit an elder son in a country borstal had been ...”