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“... adult, when I learned that the slipper was not of verre, but of vair: which is to say, ermine. The prince and his agents were ranging the kingdom with a tiny female organ in hand, his ideal bride in miniature. Never mind her face: he had not raised his eyes so far. All he knew was that the fit was tight.Three, four, I am still four: I think I will be it for ...”

“... Frederick the Great, Beyond Soap and Water, as his Nietzschean son was beyond Good and Evil.’ Harry Furniss wrote that ‘Lady Wilde, had she been cleaned up and plainly and rationally dressed, would have made a remarkably fine model of the Grand Dame, but with all her paint and tinsel and tawdry tragedy-queen get-up she was a walking burlesque of ...”

“... on the character of the hoaxer and the trickster – Cagliostro, Cesare Borgia, the Great Orsino, Harry Lime, Mr Arkadin, Hank Quinlan. Quite often he is a magician, on screen as well as off. In F for Fake, he provides both critique and demonstration of forgery in action, the nature of illusion, the twinning of lies and truth, the original and the copy. He ...”

“... Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would always hit the spot. The secret of his extraordinary popularity was his voice. His high-pitched giggles ...”

“... my cut-glass maternal grandmother as the ‘Fast World War’), a very messy affair which had made Harry Clack’s lungs turn green. Harry worked in the potting sheds of my mother’s ancestral home and hacked up an eternal spew of mustard-gas phlegm. This got him out of going to the second war, which was a replay of the ...”

“... like ‘The Blue from Heaven’, ‘Fafnir and the Knights’, ‘The Frozen Lake’, ‘The Frog Prince’ and ‘The Ass’: the strange stateliness of their pacing, their weird combinations of the wishful and the inexorable, need time to work their effects. Smith’s reputation as a quirky miniaturist often preceded her; like others before and ...”

“... Union flag mask, Park View recently hosted a visit from the Royal College of Defence Studies and a Harry Potter Trivia Evening; it had a Christmas card competition, and one girl was picked to meet Prince William. The school leadership is new, the trust that oversees the running of the school has a new name and the school ...”

“... a concert in Stockholm on 12 June, in the presence of the queens of Sweden and England, as well as Prince Philip, Princess Margaret and members of the Swedish royal family. Sargent was in his element, the concert was a triumph, and he received a great ovation. But Sargent’s greatest and most sustained efforts went into the Promenade Concerts, where he ...”

“... were reconfirmed. Two hundred years after ‘Rule Britannia’ was first performed before the Prince of Wales, Britain once again, in the summer of 1940, proved itself the patron of liberty. New Whig histories (Churchill, Trevelyan) which upheld the myth of Britain’s distinctive tradition of freedom and equipoise sold by the hundred thousand. Orwell, in ...”

“... the obituary, Sam had had a late flowering and that in his nineties he had figured in one of the Harry Potter films. The obituary written by Nicholas de Jongh.14 July. I am reading as a bedside book The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. Simply an account of the customers and the (sometimes meagre) takings of a bookshop in Wigtown in Scotland, it’s ...”

“... in sympathy with what he called Taylor’s ‘appetites’ and bought her a diamond pendant from Harry Winston.‘The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo’, which he read at the funeral, was Taylor and Burton’s favourite poem. It starts:How to keep – is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch or ...”

“... his face … If Wilde’s plays in London didn’t run for three hundred performances, and if the Prince of Wales didn’t attend his first nights, he would be in prison and Lord Douglas as well.’ Gide did not tell his mother what really happened to him in Algiers. He recounted it in Si le grain ne meurt, 30 years later, and said that it had been the ...”

“... The most startling case pre-Vietnam was the atomic bomb, about which Congress knew nothing until Harry Truman decided to use it without Congressional approval. Lyndon Johnson, eager to force a favourable settlement in Vietnam, stretched the principle even further, which in turn has cleared the way for George W. Bush to widen the constitutional gap opened for ...”

“... US handed over its dirty work in Iraq to another private outfit with a genius for publicity: Erik Prince’s Blackwater, which reinvented itself as Xe, which reinvented itself as Academi. In 2020, it was reported that Prince had approached Wagner to offer them his services. Wagner wasn’t interested: it’s their war ...”

“... then declined to answer them.As Javid left the sports centre, the queen arrived, accompanied by Prince William. Sue Harris, the head of the borough’s Environmental Health Department, took them round. As soon as the queen appeared in the main hall, Mrs Jafari, the dead man’s widow, let out the most chilling howl, as if the terrible fact of what had ...”