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“... reading Heffer’s equivalents of a few decades ago – Peregrine Worsthorne, Henry Fairlie, Frank Johnson. Perhaps Heffer once took this line too. But at some point in his life he discovered Carlyle, whose biography he wrote, and he now seems determined to write history in the Carlylean vein.* There should therefore be a virtuous ruling class; it should ...”

“... was headed, in red letters. On the first page was a cartoon labelled ‘LOCKDOWN’, showing Boris Johnson in a white coat, holding a syringe, standing over two masked policemen wrestling to the ground a dreadlocked protestor who’d been holding a placard reading ‘GOVERNMENT LIES’.I skimmed the contents of the leaflet. It seemed a combination of ...”

“... the Democratic Party from Woodrow Wilson (elected in 1912) to Franklin Roosevelt (1932) and Lyndon Johnson (1964). More than a century later, Democratic candidates still criss-cross the country trying to rekindle the lost Populist magic. In fact, the present campaign season has seen even some Republicans groping for the prairie Democrat’s standards. But ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... the chair of the BBC board arranging an £800,000 loan for Starmer, as Richard Sharp did for Johnson. But speaking to people within Labour you get the sense that the party often doesn’t recognise the tension between private interests and public office, especially when those involved are what one person described as ‘members of the Labour ...”

“... direct a Mafia film called Donnie Brasco. The producers were Barry Levinson and his partner, Mark Johnson. We had first met when Levinson, Alan Parker and I had dinner in London. It was a wonderfully smug affair: the last three films we had directed, Rain Man, Mississippi Burning and Dangerous Liaisons, had between them received 23 Oscar nominations. Levinson ...”

“... But anyone engaged with the world as it looks in 2022 can see hard choices all around.Paul Johnson of the Institute for Fiscal Studies summed up the state of Britain’s political economy in a single chart. For the best part of two generations healthcare spending had gone up while defence spending went down: battleships into hospitals. But now, with no ...”

“... at the University of Texas was one of the two principal sponsors (along with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library), although the president and staff of the hyper-rich Pennzoil Company and sundry U of T outfits are also thanked for their ‘support’. America may be undergoing Thirdworldisation but it cannot catch up with Britain’s faster progress. Thus ...”

“... an alliance of local notables, not a mass organisation. The Democratic Party’s true father is Martin Van Buren, the son of a tavern-keeper and the only president who grew up speaking a language other than English (Dutch). In the 1820s, Van Buren made the party a powerful electoral machine complete with a network of local newspapers, regular nominating ...”

“... suddenly discovered him. Empire of the Sun was shortlisted for the Booker Prize – making Martin Amis feel ‘as if the street drug-pusher had been made chairman of DuPont pharmaceuticals’ – and sold more than all Ballard’s previous books put together, even before it was turned into an Oscar-nominated film by Tom Stoppard and Steven ...”

“... in 1979. The two principal biographies, still widely used as works of reference, and which Martin Battestin’s long-awaited volume is designed to supersede, are those of Wilbur Cross (1918) and F. Homes Dudden (1952). Cross has usually been treated as the standard work, while Dudden’s book has had a bad press. In my undergraduate days I heard dons ...”

“... of the earliest kittens to fluster Benson with his friskiness) or Eton masters like William Johnson Cory and Oscar Browning, his fear of sex was so great that he could keep his footing in the ‘precarious trade’ of schoolmastering and avoid that common exile for the too attentive Etonian pederast, a fellowship at King’s. Having chosen to lock ...”

“... by, I think, 14 publishers’ (its protagonist is ‘Kingsley Amis’, like the character ‘Martin Amis’ in Money); or the unfinished ‘Difficulties with Girls’, written in 1981-82 (a title retained for a quite different novel of 1988, the sequel to Take a Girl like You). One also has to come to the Huntington to read the letters (or many of ...”

“... he explicitly argues with most often is his fellow philo-American of British origins, Paul Johnson (once on the Left, then Thatcherite, now an admirer of Tony Blair), whose own celebratory history of the United States appeared in 1997. In imagining an American narrative around which a renewed progressivism could unite, Evans adopts the Popular Front ...”

“... No one mentioned the atrocity in Charleston explicitly; no one had to. We were in the church where Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967. We were honouring the life of America’s leading free jazz musician in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the ...”