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“... father in 1935 and next married Hughdie Auchincloss, who later became stepfather to Jackie Kennedy. She had eight children with different husbands, but wasn’t apparently much of a mother to any of them. She was a drinker, and a lover of Clark Gable’s. Vidal isn’t entirely forthcoming about his mother and father: his parents’ lovers, it ...”

“... autobiography, he has a chapter about his interests outside football. One of his passions is the Kennedy assassination, to which he has devoted a lot of time and a fair bit of money, collecting documents, videos and artefacts. He bought at auction an edition of the Warren Commission report signed by Gerald Ford. He has a treasured personal copy of the ...”

“... his manicures, orthodontics, his walnut-stain flesh, still failed to achieve the status of a Kennedy off-cut: cynics persisted in seeing him as a man who’d had so many blow jobs he looked like an inflatable. Marks could afford to grin out of the cover panel of Mr Nice. His teeth were white as glacial chippings, but they were paste. The price he paid ...”

“... noted committed Trumpistas (Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, Chris Christie); a few party stalwarts (Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell – who was booed) taking a sip of, if not exactly drinking the Trump Kool-Aid; and a breadline of hungry ‘rising stars’, fixed on the 2020 elections, hoping to be discovered as Barack Obama was at the 2004 Democratic Convention. On ...”

“... becoming Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford. It is possible that Paul Kraus, the half-crazed student of Arab alchemy and another of Hourani’s friends, was murdered in Cairo in 1944, because of a suspected connection with the assassins of Lord Moyne. Hourani’s own life, however, was, outwardly at least, a tranquil affair ...”

“... feminine dress. It was the look of the working girl, hitherto unknown to fashion. She did it while Paul Poiret was still promoting sumptuous colour and monkey fur, egrets and dramatic drapery, and other designers still aimed to clothe the elegant woman in an air of complexity, difficulty, mystery and obvious expensiveness. Chanel’s early designs were the ...”

“... two magazines considered left-wing – Tribune, under Michael Foot, and the New Statesman, under Paul Johnson. It was a different world. In those distant days, Harold Wilson was the Prime Minister. He was being assailed by ‘left-wingers’, people like me, for being too subservient to the United States Government, with particular reference to the American ...”

“... Where once its politics were leftish, its stance investigative, and its key influence Paul Foot, now its politics are rightish, its stance prurient, and its key figures Nigel Dempster, Peter McKay and Auberon Waugh. The radical lampoon has become required reading on the magazine syllabus of every Sloane Ranger. Moreover, the Eye, that fearless ...”

“... a dizzying but pleasurable succession of meetings with his circle of intimates – Walter Berry, Paul Bourget, Abbé Mugnier, Ralph and Lisa Curtis, Madame de Cossé-Brissac, Rosa Fitz-James (“the best hostess I have ever known”), and Philomène de Lévis-Mirepoix – all members of the fashionable upper crust of cosmopolitan Paris.’ Was there no one ...”

“... and whom he presumably doesn’t wish to fight are not writers. ‘I can make a landscape like Mr Paul Cézanne, I learned how to make a landscape from Mr Paul Cézanne by walking through the Luxembourg Museum a thousand times with an empty gut, and I am pretty sure that if Mr Paul were ...”

“... everyone else to smell like her and look like her. ‘I imposed black,’ she told her friend Paul Morand in the collection of reminiscences he published after her death as The Allure of Chanel, ‘it’s still going strong today, for black wipes out everything else around.’ Chanel No. 5 – still the bestselling perfume in the world– also wipes out ...”

“... 11 of Moser, or in Alice Kaplan’s Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis (2012) – highly recommended. From Paris, it was on to New York. Meeting Partisan Review’s co-editor William Phillips at a party, Sontag, now a single mother living on a shoestring, got right to business: ‘How do you ...”

“... her.It should be noted that the party was held two weeks after the assassination of President Kennedy, such boozy antics somewhat dissonant in what was for most Americans a joyless holiday season. Yet what appears to have peeved Kazin was something closer to home: the crass spectacle of chums and colleagues gloating over their ascendant ...”

“... In prison he reads Marx, Lenin, Fanon, Mao. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy and the war in Vietnam come as news from outside. He writes of his own frustrations, of Garvey, Paul Robeson and Toussaint. The letters have been through the censor; and many things must therefore be addressed ...”

“... this book I cannot explain,’ he wisely concedes.) But he has come up with a nice idea. Just as Paul Fussell set himself, in The Great War and Modern Memory, to map the mythicisation of the First World War in the popular conscience – the images and icons we remember it by, and how these are themselves symptomatic of the selective desires, prejudices and ...”