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“... the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’. Her first column, in January 1954, was about a careless dry cleaner, and began the dispatches from ‘a rather long-winded lady’ whom the New Yorker heard ...”

“... caviar and foie gras, the drink to Stolichnaya and Dom Perignon ... Peter Whitehead married Dido Goldsmith, daughter of Teddy and niece of Sir James. I was Peter’s best man. Bianca Jagger was Dido’s best lady’); the Thatcherite on-yer-bike business memoirs (lists of flights, airport hotel massages, exotic sunsets, cockerels’ balls for ...”

“... didn’t put up a candidate in the Richmond Park by-election that saw the defeat of the Tory Zac Goldsmith, and have announced their support for Labour’s Rupa Huq in Ealing Central and Acton; the Lib Dems won’t contest Caroline Lucas’s Brighton Pavilion seat. (Ukip is also standing down candidates in several seats to clear the ground for Tories.) If ...”

“... photographer who became an icy director. Sometimes this psychology is bluntly moralised, as when John Baxter, another biographer (HarperCollins, 1997), says that Kubrick’s making Eyes Wide Shut, ‘a film about self-involved people and their fantasies’, has ‘a sour inevitability’. And sometimes it is aestheticised, as when LoBrutto calls Kubrick ‘a ...”

“... that this play was, as Peterley reveals, co-authored by J.B. Priestley under the pseudonym Peter Goldsmith. Richard Pennington’s slip here, by failing as editor to move Peterley’s diary from June to July, is almost an invitation to the critic to misunderstand his methods. For in terms of such events we are reading an accurate account, including some ...”

“... in the basement of the Architectural Press, the paintings of David Jones and Eric Ravilious, and John Minton’s decorations for the cookery books of Elizabeth David. Only in the coolest hardware shops or the deepest Habitat basements can one believe that the purpose of kitchen design is functional. In the history of taste, painting is only occasionally ...”

“... by such luminaries of the conservative movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the ...”

“... Hall, which opened in 1612, was an imposing three-storey house standing at the bottom end of St John’s Street, not far from Smithfield market. When it was built the street had to be rerouted around it, which did not please the residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving ...”

“... he looked at, Lorck looked at in a peculiar way. One bundle of drawings, which the diarist John Evelyn owned, was split up and sold at auction in 1966 – the compilers of this catalogue have been advertising rather forlornly in the art trade press for news of their whereabouts. The catalogue is Fischer’s life’s work. Many have worried about what ...”

“... Wilson also befriended and distributed titles to men like Alun Chal-font, Eric Miller and Jimmy Goldsmith, and that he seems, indeed, to have been a very poor judge of character in those who flattered his ego. As for the 19 trips to Moscow, Wilson was always prey to the hope that he could achieve an economic turn-around via a large increase in Soviet ...”

“... who have kicked over the traces and made good Down South. The novelist and ex-Bingley librarian John Braine of Room at the Top fame will later come into the same category.The only writer she does read with any regularity, though, has nothing to do with the North at all. This is Beverley Nichols, of whose column in Woman’s Own she is a devoted fan, and ...”

“... It is easy to argue about the uncertain Irishness of certain writers. Was Sterne Irish? Was Oliver Goldsmith Irish? Was Robert Tressell Irish? Is Iris Murdoch Irish? But the argument about who was gay and who was not and how we know is more difficult. How can someone be gay if, as in the case of Gogol, there is no direct evidence? Yet if you trawl through ...”

“... states such as Ukraine have no choice but to submit to the nearest great power, has run its course.John Mearsheimer’s argument of recent weeks that what we are seeing played out is ‘not imperialism [but] great-power politics’ will strike many as a distinction without a difference. Imperial history has far more to teach us than our decaying Atlantic ...”

“... of all improvements, and with every prospect of sharing in the coming wealth of nations, became as Goldsmith described it in ‘The Deserted Village’:Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey,Where wealth accumulates, and men decay;Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;A breath can make them, as a breath has made;But a bold peasantry, their ...”