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“... Doctor’s last four incarnations (in reverse order: Paul McGann, Sylvester McCoy, Colin Baker, Peter Davison), though obviously no match for Tom Baker – at the controls of a souped-up Tardis. As I write, he’s at the mercy of a gang of obese aliens who’ve long been lurking behind the scenes at Downing St, and for complicated reasons have just staged ...”

“... because I may be some help on Commons’). Blair also offered advice to Rupert and James Murdoch. Peter Mandelson offered to prep Brooks for an appearance before the Commons Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. Two Conservative peers gave glowing character references: Baron Black of Brentwood, a former director of the Press Complaints Commission, for ...”

“... interest – and his bosses had known what he was doing. In his closing remarks, the prosecutor, Peter Wright, picked out something said by another of the defendants, Ben O’Driscoll, who had been a deputy news editor at the Sun. In 2010, Virginia Wheeler’s ‘Chelsea Copper’ had told her that a singer’s sister had been impaled on railings. ‘She’s ...”

“... alongside a couple of other collections that have recently appeared in paperback, Martin Amis’s The War against Cliché and Frank Kermode’s Pleasing Myself. That’s a tough poker table to ask anyone to sit at, and it’s impressive that some of Hitchens’s best pieces, or at least some of his best paragraphs, don’t seem out of ...”

“... on the earth. I took everything to extremes in my old life.’ Alf is 33 years old. His friend Martin, a fellow Freegan, popped his head through from the back of the van and pushed his glasses up his nose. Martin is 36 and comes from Sydney. He said he was disillusioned as a teenager by the way everyone was obsessed with ...”

“... published a generation ago, in 1959, which includes over a hundred pages on Spanish painting by Martin Soria. Brown’s account differs from Soria’s in several important respects. In the first place, it makes some significant changes to the canon. One of the artists revalued is Juan Bautista Maino (a follower of Caravaggio who more or less gave up ...”

“... a spectrum of close to long-lookers can be drawn up: Hindenburg (+4.5D), Edward Gibbon (+4.37D), Martin Luther (+3.0D), Bismarck (−3.0D), Schopenhauer (−3.5D), Schubert (−3.75D), Beethoven (−4.0D), Gregor Mendel (−4.5D), Marie Antoinette (−4.0D), Goethe (−6.0D). The figures represent dioptres, which express the strength of spectacle ...”

“... by the Prince of Wales. Fellow guests included a number of Tory grandees. The fate of Speaker Martin was much discussed. A definite mood on the Tory side that he must go. I strolled back through the park with Kate Hoey. ‘A pity you are standing down,’ she said. ‘You’d make an excellent Speaker.’  To my dismay, today’s roll-call of The Fallen ...”

“... of the early Seventies. Several of the players – Billy Bremner, Norman Hunter, Johnny Giles, Peter Lorimer, Alan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke – had a lot of ability, but they also tended to have Jekyll-and-Hyde natures, the Hyde component of which their manager, Don Revie, did nothing to suppress. The fact that the most successful team in English football was ...”

“... On The World at One, Sir Patrick Mayhew was invited to respond to a (dubbed) interview with Martin McGuinness in which Sinn Fein’s vice-president had said the ceasefire would endure ‘in all circumstances’. Mayhew said he thought what Martin had had to say was of great interest. ...”

“... of uncertainty forming itself almost sinisterly into a style. Some change according to the light. Peter York imagined the 1980s to be a time of relentless new opportunity and inclusiveness and money-making brio. But York published his book 15 years ago; the 1980s are generally seen now as a low point for Britain, a time when old-fashioned wars and ...”

“... film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger ...”

“... at that point to set the juices racing. ‘I think a cup of coffee is in order,’ I said to Martin Johnson of the Independent and Alan Lee of the Times, ‘and the only place on the ground that serves a proper filtered cup of the stuff is the Hove Shop.’ Most County grounds have an establishment like this, where anything that can reasonably be sold at ...”

“... Francis Hughes died, and eight more men – Patsy O’Hara, Raymond McCreesh, Joe McDonnell, Martin Hurson, Kevin Lynch, Kieran Doherty, Thomas McElwee and Michael Devine – starved themselves to death in the months that followed. During that summer of 1981, the Northern Ireland crisis came closer than ever before or since to carnage. Levels of mob as ...”

“... about the Slump and how to cure it, and, by extension, right about the Old Gang blocking his path? Martin Pugh’s publishers tell us breathlessly that ‘this book demonstrates for the first time how close Britain came to being a Fascist state in the interwar years.’ Is that a fact or just a pretty piece of hype? Does the limelight that Mosley continued to ...”