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“... the world was given to intricate thematic contrasts and parallels among its materials, to careful cross-cutting between city and country, high society and hunting, the salon and the racetrack, home and abroad, it would have written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. But I’m afraid he meant something simpler and more familiar: he was making the old, strange ...”

“... that this smiling young Scottish public schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if ...”

“... which may have wide public consequences, can only be appraised by reference to his earliest years. Anthony Clare, from his psychiatrist’s chair, would write a far more interesting profile than the average political editor. Ben Pimlott, in his brilliant biography of Hugh Dalton, caught the character of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer with great ...”

“... Brown. Much the same happens with work by non-politicians. Two very good non-extremist studies, Anthony Quinton’s The Politics of Imperfection and Noel O’Sullivan’s Conservatism, appear, but they are almost alone. Norton and Aughey’s Conservatives and Conservatism is well beyond Honderich’s ken. Even Lord Coleraine’s right-wing For Conservatives ...”

“... inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter alios) the undergraduate Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into words,’ recorded Dalton, who had been in love with ...”

“... within a single individual’s response, both attracts readers to the stories and repels them. Anthony Hamilton, an urbane Jacobite aristocrat and soldier, living in Paris in exile at the court of James II, and a much petted cavaliere servente of the court ladies, read Galland’s translation straight off the press before writing a parody, ‘Fleur ...”

“... in longhand, often in lockable, leather-bound volumes. He generated even more words than Dick Cross-man and Barbara Castle, so many that the work of selection and editorship has been too much for him to attempt alone. He has therefore always relied on an academic editor. Unlike Addison, he has not apparently exercised editorial control over the ...”

“... but like Christs to whom something lowering is bound to happen, such as falling off the Cross. When one of Toomey’s boyfriends, a black, asks him if he knows ‘that big word’ humiliation, he replies: ‘I practically invented it.’ He could also have invented the sayings ‘the good die young,’ ‘whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth’ and ...”

“... are a marketing department’s dream, designed with travel-brochure simplicity and accessibility: Cross Asia by Train; Tour Britain by its Coastline; Go Everywhere in China, without recourse to tricky canoes, pack animals or primitive sanitary arrangements behind trees. When Theroux rides the Trans-Siberian Express again on his way out of China, his fellow ...”

“... party. It is tempting to see the large-scale working-class defections to Thatcher in 1979 and the cross-class movement to the Alliance in 1981 as merely the after-quakes from the initial explosions detonated by Powell, race and Europe. By the time the SDP was launched in an attempt to break the old political mould, that mould had been under concerted attack ...”

“... experiences ‘help to define the nature of the times through which they lived’. The constant cross-cutting from private lives to public issues and from one individual to another is in danger of leaving the reader confused, but at the same time the device of the multiple viewpoint does make conflict more intelligible. Spence’s latest book, The Memory ...”

“... and both men were reactionary romantics, enamoured of their nation’s past. But by 1942-43, the Cross of Lorraine had become for Churchill the ‘heaviest cross he had to bear’. Just as Churchill moved towards Roosevelt, so de Gaulle now moved towards Moulin. He, too, discovered France’s republican and democratic ...”

“... forebears is prelapsarian; these nocturnal experiences held no shame). Magdalena of the Cross jerks in satanic couplings with a devil called Balban, who is exorcised from her body and exits in the form of a caterpillar ‘with a loud wind … before repossessing her with unprecedented vigour’. Metaphors turn into beguiling reality: after her death ...”

“... had arrived. They were considering which hospital to take him to: he would be going to the Charing Cross Hospital on Fulham Palace Road. There had always been many problems with my father’s health; he had a bad heart, a consequence of the rheumatic disease he had as a child; he suffered from atrial fibrillation, he had one kidney, he had high blood ...”

“... Amis has been encased in an obese 995 pages from Zachary Leader. Hilary Spurling’s Life of Anthony Powell breaks with this pattern. The longest-lived of all significant novelists of the last century, his 94 years are covered in fewer than 450 pages of text. In part, that’s because she confines the final quarter of his life to the briefest of ...”