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“... from the start. Fabian of the Yard shot through a Dostoevsky filter. Sexton Blake ghosted by Jean-Paul Sartre. The ‘General Contract’ Cook called it, the vulture on the shoulder. Vulture ventriloquism. Death and poetry. Raymond doesn’t write about poetry, he is poetry. Although, like James, he’s fond of a good quotation – Eliot, or sometimes ...”

“... Think Pink!’ Kay Thompson exhorted, playing a singing Diana Vreeland in Funny Face (1957), one of several Hollywood movies of the postwar period set in a pasteboard advent-calendar Paris, with Leslie Caron or Audrey Hepburn as the elegant, monstrously innocent gamine. ‘Pink for shoes! Pink for hose! Pink for gloves and chapeaus!’ The song, disappointingly, fails to mention the special status of Pompadour pink, formulated at Sèvres in 1757 to please Louis XV’s favourite mistress and adviser ...”

“... to remember – to mourn – in a manner lost to survivors of 1939-45 and their progeny. Like E.P. Thompson, Winter wants to rescue the past from the condescension of the present. But his past is, in fact, the past’s past, its intimacy with tradition: ‘Before the Death Camps, and the thermonuclear cloud, most men and women were still able to reach back ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... is one of the Bulldog Drummonds of the narrative. Along with ‘his great associate’ Edward Thompson, he is ‘a plausible candidate ... for leading hero of the years in which the forward march of consumer individualist values halted at the cliff edge, and the call for different, new, vastly more mutual, altruistic, and less destructive ...”

“... According to E.P. Thompson, The Pilgrim’s Progress and The Rights of Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th ...”

“... portrait was the basis for a new painting (is it still right to say ‘of her’?) by J.H. Thompson, which is now the cover of the Penguin Classics edition of Gaskell’s Life. What relationship does this woman bear to the original? Getty Images offers, with no disclaimer, a reproduction of a watercolour from the National Portrait Gallery that for some ...”

“... Coventry Central Libraries after the fashion of the time) with my ex-schoolfellow Ginger Thompson ... This was my first experience of the addictive excitement a large open-access public library generates.’ When he jumped over the counter, as it were, things were rather different though father’s footsteps come into this too: it you can’t be a ...”

“... having your life picked over, but having it picked over by sneering toffs is very grim indeed. Paul Hill and Gerry Conlon have separately told me the same story of how, during their trial for the Guildford bombings, they used to stare at Sir Michael Havers QC, their prosecutor and chief tormentor. Havers had a nervous twitch and when the defendants ...”

“... often in soak on the draining board, fads as I thought even as a boy of ten, picked up from Miss Thompson, a herbalistic lady living in the Hallidays who used to give Dad burdock and suchlike ‘for his blood’. 21 February. On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn’t have inhabited his ...”

“... Sir John Sunderland, Roger Carr, Rick Braddock, Ellen Marram, Guy Elliott, Rosemary Thorne, David Thompson, Sanjiv Ahuja, Wolfgang Berndt, Lord Patten and Raymond Viault. Only Berndt replied (Chris Patten’s assistant told me he was in ‘rural Asia’ without email, then, when the deadline was extended, too ill to respond). Berndt told me he couldn’t ...”

“... at large events in London and won support from celebrities, among them Rowan Williams, Emma Thompson, Grayson Perry, Noam Chomsky, David Byrne, David King (the former chief scientific adviser to the government) and Thunberg.Less well known is their following among lawyers, farmers (including livestock farmers), medics (last year the Lancet called for ...”

“... must have been like all that hot afternoon. She then tells me about a programme on Francis Thompson she’d heard on the wireless, how he had tried to become a priest but had felt he had failed in his vocation, and had become a tramp. Then, unusually, she told me a little of her own life, and how she tried to become a nun on two occasions, had ...”