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“... you want to see Winnie Mandela?’ I couldn’t think at that moment of anything I wanted more.We walked to a large house nearby, entering through the basement. A group of young men were drinking and smoking. They nodded us through, and we made our way to a TV room where a slasher movie flickered in front of an array of ...”

“... Hexter does not regard as a good historian, I would feel happier with rather more definition here. We all think our own kind of history the right kind, but Hexter’s kind is perhaps narrower than that of some very good historians. Mink observes that ‘Hexter seldom resists the temptation to caricature his philosophical adversaries, a temptation all the more ...”

“... Poland, in the period that interests Butterwick, contained three-quarters of a million Uncle Matthews. Nobody envied a king who proposed to reign over them.In reality, the szlachta’s claim to embody the nation contradicted the Commonwealth’s wonderful diversity. A score of ethnicities lived there, from German and Scottish settlers through Lithuanian ...”

“... a 20th-century composer of international stature, whose last name was that of the nation itself. We’d done it! Here was Benjamin Britain OM, ‘Baron Britain of Aldeburgh’, whose Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra was as close to state music as a piece not actually the national anthem could be, and which cleverly merged spiky modern fugue with a ...”

“... this pair of ghosts, Beckett’s narrative runs from the hopeful founding conference of the CP (we thought of it simply as ‘the Party’) to its 43rd and final Congress in 1991. One of the strong points of Beckett’s book is its wealth of portraits of individuals, among them Harry Pollitt and Johnny Campbell; Willie Gallacher and Phil Piratin, two of the ...”

“... the husky female voice-over promised. Here was a story that would excite us because of what we already thought we knew. Judging by the immediate critical response to Fiona MacCarthy’s biography, the appetite for Byron’s life is indeed sharpened by all the stories we already ...”

“... and unexpected delights’. Another of the residents at the Stanley Crescent Hotel was Mary Matthews, a secretary at the Daily Express, whom Ballard had met and fallen in love with shortly before joining the RAF. ‘In due course Mary became pregnant,’ and they got married in September 1955. Not long afterwards, Ballard’s first stories were ...”

“... 1950s, Harry Pollitt could still veto the appointment of the middle-class former student George Matthews as his successor and insist on the worker John Gollan. Some twenty years later the industrial organisers of the Party were a Canadian lawyer and the son of an academic, and no adequately qualified worker could be found to take up the post of district ...”

“... We can know Byron better than anyone has ever known him. Leslie Marchand’s edition of the Letters and Journals, which is far more extensive than any previous collection, has now covered Byron’s whole life. J.J. McGann’s complete edition of the poems is proceeding expeditiously: the three volumes to date include all the poems written before Byron left England in 1816, and Volume II has the whole of the masterpiece Childe Harold, including Cantos III and IV, which were written in exile in 1816 and 1818 ...”

“... which has been kitted out as a vaccination centre. Though neither of us knows quite where it is, we realise we must be getting close from the number of eighty-year-olds and carers making their way off the Kentish Town Road, all on the same errand. Rupert isn’t allowed in, and I go fairly briskly through a series of ...”

“... of figuring out how to make best use of the money they had pledged. The result was Giving What We Can, a charity that encourages people to hand over at least 10 per cent of their future incomes for philanthropic purposes, and advises them on how to get the most out of their money. Since the charity was founded in 2009 it has received more than $400 million ...”

“... and which went on to say of the partisans that they were assuredly not ‘the party with whom we hope ultimately to negotiate’. The partisans might well decide that a national leadership about to forswear the Axis nonetheless fell short of their requirements: or that was London’s judgment, and indeed something of the sort happened when the Bulgarian ...”

“... of bottled water to the aged and infirm, for no reward but thank yous. ‘All that week, when we ran out of water, I delivered water to all the old people’s places who couldn’t carry it and that,’ he said as he took me on a tour of his old clients. ‘Sometimes they brought you water in little tiny bottles and little old ladies could carry that. But ...”

“... holding in these Beaverbrook papers, he owns more than the present wielder of power there, Lord Matthews – the tycoon admirer of Mrs Thatcher – from Trafalgar Holdings. In yet another sortie into the Fleet Holdings battle Swiss bankers are believed to be buying shares eagerly – and again, they are buying them for unknown clients. Another salient is ...”

“... the benefit, not to the person, but to the novel? There needs to be some novelistic payoff, if we accept that the mere desire to extend your range, to become a god in your medium, speaks more reliably to vanity than talent. For Burgess, the project of writing a long novel bringing together far-flung crises and corners of 20th-century history more or less ...”