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“... Catwoman Tattooed Thief Prowls Streets In Tony Neighbourhoods, Eludes Police for Years. American news item. All words in italics are quoted from this. James, the yardman, was working out back,   Maude, the maid, was tossing a salad – what better beginning, if you’re having a crack   at writing a criminal ballad? And I do want to make it plain: Atlanta’s notorious Catwoman had struck again ...”

“... a real picture of people one has met and may at any time meet again ... But then to let Tony be detained by some madman introduced an entirely fresh note ... it seemed manufactured and not real. It would be easy to reply that every novelist has to combine the manufactured with the ‘real’, but Green’s criticism goes deeper than that, as is ...”

“... Labour Party Conference last month – when Gordon pretended that he still had a lot of time for Tony, on hearing which Cherie said that’s a lie, but being overheard herself had to deny she’d said any such thing, though the next day Tony more or less admitted that her denial wasn’t to be trusted either, before going ...”

“... wheels bolted to planks – the first skateboarders. There are girls and boys, black and white, from the city’s poorest neighbourhood, and they outnumber the spectating parents in the photograph by 13 to one. The boy whose father takes him swimming, the girl whose mother takes her to the theatre, children whose parents ‘do things’ with them ...”

“... says, before going on to ask: but how do you reconcile free will with divine omniscience? (Tony Blair must be relieved that Boethius doesn’t sit on a House of Commons select committee.) Philosophy has a pretty decent answer. (The Prime Minister must long to have someone like that on his side.) Anglo-Saxon chiefs have changed over the last millennium ...”

“... ideas, both visual and narrative. A grand shoot-out in the Guggenheim Museum in New York, with its white winding galleries circling an empty centre, is the sort of thing that would occur to any director. Only a director who had run out of other possibilities would hang on to the idea for more than a minute, though, and Tykwer hangs on to it for ever. After ...”

“... Antonia White died in 1980 leaving behind four novels, over thirty translations (mainly Colette), two books about cats, some stories and a piece of autobiography. She also left two daughters (Susan Chitty and Lyndall Hopkinson) and more than a million words of diaries – work that some consider her greatest achievement, and the editing of which led to a public row (and legal action) between the girls, who disagreed about what kind of woman their mother was ...”

“... Room (1983-84) is an installation that evokes a bare clinic: a partition with a window, a white trolley partially covered by a standard blanket, and an intrusive monitor showing a looped video of Thatcher delivering her final speech before the 1983 general election. In effect, the notional patient undergoes two kinds of treatment at ...”

“... Tony Blair is the most successful politician of his generation. He has transformed the Labour Party from a protest coalition into Britain’s natural and (it seems these days) perpetual government, a feat achieved by neither Clement Attlee nor Harold Wilson and not even attempted by the Party’s only other postwar premier, James Callaghan ...”

“... those changes in the relevant law which are the objective of his own legislative programme. Tony Benn’s contribution is distinguished by its unique style, which reads more like notes for a lecture than the finished article. In a series of short, staccato paragraphs, not obviously linked to any developing theme, he outlines his (not wholly ...”

“... Norman Tebbit announced the other day that Tony Blair’s government had made both obesity and Aids in this country much worse by doing ‘everything it can to promote buggery’. Aside from anything else, this comment might cause us to reflect (buggerishly) on the England beloved of bigots like Tebbit and to see it as a land not only of warm beer and cricket on the village green, but also, more significantly, of generations of excellent buggers performing on radio, stage and television, warming the cockles of English hearts and occasionally laying down their trousers in pursuit of their genius ...”

“... much the embodiment of her own favourite word, ‘zest’. In 1923 she married a Lloyd’s broker, Tony Maxtone Graham; she wrote poems, hymns and short stories, and did well. They had three children and lived in style in Chelsea. After a decade, however, the marriage went cold. His life began to revolve around cars and golf; she retaliated with botany and ...”

“... but avoiding the kind of unpopularity that might threaten his status as a proud member of White’s Club. When my father died, the Second World War was ending and Jack, nearly fifty, was broke. On the day after the funeral, my mother returned to the subject of the falcon. By now she had succeeded in infecting me with her sense of urgency in the ...”

“... red wine. But photography was always the aim. In 1969 he photographed the images on his black and white television as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon. Motion in space is always slow motion, so a photographer looking on had more time to think about the action, such as it was. ‘Always been interested in astronomy and planets,’ says ...”

“... to try to utter.’ No woman would assent to that last sentence unless she wanted to end up a white goddess, or an ordinary white elephant. (The Kings of Siam used to give a white elephant to hated courtiers, who would then promptly ruin themselves on its costly maintenance.) Yet John ...”