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“... of the Chelsea Press, editor of Flann O’Brien and Oscar Wilde, and the Dublin social historian Peter Costello, should have been inspired to produce a full-length biography of, so to speak, Our Founder. It is in its way a unique undertaking. Hard to think of any other father in the history of literature, more particularly of literature in English, who made ...”

“... he even hesitates to say ‘partnership’. Maybe. One nice vignette is of Mair using a favourite porter as a personal dogsbody – ‘Panormo this, Panormo that’ – and even sending him to check the passenger list for one of Beveridge’s transatlantic voyages ‘to see who was travelling with him’. It is not every director who gets such attention from ...”

“... loop, dropped by a couple of times a month with news about the agent David Obst or the director Peter Bogdanovich, both dying to do Mallory. He drank bourbon, and when his glass was empty he held it high and rattled the ice cubes for a refill. He stayed until the bottle was empty and it was time to find another roost. He made nightly rounds of the city like ...”

“... imaginations of Britons at home. Neither Stephen Daniels’s collection of essays nor those in Roy Porter’s Myths of the English explore the imperial-domestic connection directly. Yet both books illuminate its importance.To begin with, and as several of Daniels’s fine, perceptive essays suggest, knowing that they were an imperial people made Britons at ...”

“... Ireland Secretary after a mass break-out of Republican prisoners from the Maze prison, and Peter Brooke failed in a more recent attempt to leave the same office after he had sung a song on a television chat show in the Republic of Ireland, hours after seven people had been killed in a particularly bad atrocity in the Province. While ministers have been ...”

“... them difficult to spot from the air.This slow progress allowed my father, Territorial Army Captain Peter Raban of (to give his full address) ‘A’ Troop, 265 Battery, 67th Field Regiment, Royal Artillery, to spend much of 21 January putting the finishing touches to an unusually long and well-thought-out letter to my mother, which reads as if he put it ...”

“... book recognise it in one way or another. Most, like the examples by Helen Garner, David Brooks, Peter Carey, Joan London, Kate Grenville, are admirably achieved on this basis, the authors all born in the Forties or Fifties; and the names indicate that the newer European immigrants have not yet found a voice in their new language. Particularly memorable is ...”

“... is hell, or whether there is any difference. The set-up is perfectly portrayed in the movie by the porter who provides the information about Lime’s supposed death. ‘Killed at once,’ he says of the street accident. ‘Immediately. Already in hell,’ pointing upwards. ‘Or in heaven,’ pointing down. This ‘mistake’ was corrected in the German dubbed ...”

“... a lie, but by then it felt like one. When I told Jimmy Madeiros, the manager of the Underground Porter-Packer division at Harrods, where I worked for a few months, that my father had recently died, and that therefore I couldn’t continue with the job, I was telling the truth. But it felt like a lie because I had the sense that he didn’t really believe ...”

“... of England’, ‘4. or 5 different shap’d snuffboxes’) in the care of the marquis’s porter and entered Wolton’s service at the end of June. Their route lay east and southwards, through Reims, Metz, Nancy and Dijon to Lyon. In each city they set up a riding space in the yard of an inn or on a patch of grass, publicised Wolton’s bareback ...”

“... the Drop of a Brick’, a reference to Flanders and Swann’s At the Drop of a Hat and Peter Cook’s suggestion that we call it ‘Quite the best revue I’ve seen for some time. Bernard Levin’, the point being that whatever the notices this could go up at the front of house.27 January. A woman writes to me saying that having read a piece I’d ...”

“... is the one with which Woodward starts his book. Cohn, along with Trump’s staff secretary, Rob Porter, conspired to remove a letter from the president’s desk to prevent him from signing it. The letter in question was addressed to the president of South Korea, notifying him of Trump’s intention to terminate the US-Korea free trade agreement known as ...”

“... other. Lanzer’s story involves scribbled messages, missed trains, timetables, a postmistress, a porter, a waiter, a long-suffering friend in Vienna, a series of redundant captains. Everyone along the way is recruited to play a part in the charade of his obsessive endeavour knowingly to repay the wrong person. His sense of guilt is real enough, but it ...”

“... alcohol had lethal consequences for a pig-tailed macaque in 1828. An ‘excessive’ drinker of porter, it died of ‘confirmed’ dropsy. There were further indignities. In 1810, a menagerie owner called Mr Brookes imported a ‘white camel’ to Britain. The beast was a ‘novelty’ in London, but Brookes wanted it to be ‘still more novel’ and ...”

“... Certainly, to read a collection like The Oxford Book of Narrative Verse, newly-edited by Iona and Peter Opie, is to be reminded of the powerful appeal that’s made in poetry by ‘the kind of story in which, you want to know what happens next’. The Opies’ choice is often cautious and occasionally perverse. In some respects, moreover, their book belongs ...”