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“... nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his ...”

“... up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in each conceited anecdote. Of the White House staffers who did not trust him and with whom he wants to settle accounts, the most prominent two – Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and ...”

“... readily to mind, any more than in the comparably tragic case of another British infant, Alfie Evans, which Fox News and Breitbart, assisted by Nigel Farage, characterised as the practice of eugenics by a state-run medical service.As to the health and safety canards (conkers banned in school playgrounds, sack races banned on sports days, circus artistes ...”

“... prophecy supplied ‘proof of Shakespeare’s confidence in England’s destiny’, while for J.A.R. Marriott, writing in 1918, it helped show that to Shakespeare, ‘as to other Elizabethans, England was something more than a home and a country: it was an inspiration. At no period in our history has the realisation of national unity been keener, the ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... of Charles Hamilton and his works that Coker was derived in part from Hamilton’s elder brother Richard, whose Christian name provided the famous pseudonym, and who, quite clearly, was anything but a lout in the eyes of the author. And there’s a Cliff House character named Dolly whom Drotner persists in calling Jolly, as though to superimpose mood over ...”

“... Peterloo, framed by a Radical conspiracy devised by Hunt, Samuel Bamford and the newspaper editor Richard Carlile, a ‘free-thinker’. The TLS published an acerbic review of Walmsley’s book whose anonymous author was later revealed to be E.P. Thompson. In The Making of the English Working Class, the second edition of which was published in 1968, Thompson ...”

“... too many of Ponting’s insights into the misdeeds of politicians seem to be culled from Richard Crossman’s Diaries, and it’s hard to think of any source less reliable, or more likely to put one off politicians for life. Crossman was a bully and a cheat, and proud of it, and his Diaries simply boast of his misbehaviour. Clive Ponting has ...”

“... and too provocatively called ‘British history’ was generated by political circumstance. J.G.A. Pocock established its parameters in 1973, in a paper read in New Zealand just after the UK had turned its back on the Commonwealth in order to join the EEC. With a chapter in the history of Empire ending, it seemed right to investigate how a dynamic ...”

“... worlds was there, including Emile de Antonio, Henry Geldzahler, Andy Warhol, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Tom Hess, Lisette Model, Richard Avedon, Marvin Israel, and the pop art collectors Robert and Ethel Scull.’ Bosworth’s concentration on the sex-and-society aspect of her subject’s life means that she rarely ...”

“... mostly long gone and others not notable for their movie credits – Karl Lagerfeld, Walker Evans, Ernest Shackleton and Lego. In Thomson’s view film ought to be enough to detain a film-loving writer, but it isn’t. Perhaps Lane is merely keeping his options open and, who knows, doesn’t want to be a writer exclusively on film. The diversity is ...”

“... a TV crew reassured us that we were still in the real world. The tall, London-based CNN presenter Richard Quest, in tailored trenchcoat, waited impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s ...”

“... Stephen Ambrose’s judicious biography of Nixon or the recollections of Averell Harriman, Richard Holbrooke or Daniel Davidson. Mr Isaacson has added some extra but exiguous detail to the story. By shopping on both sides of the street, and betraying the side he notionally worked for, Kissinger helped the Nixon campaign in its secret effort to ...”

“... who inherited the Shakespearean gifts of his parents, at the age of 11 learning the whole of Richard II by heart in six weeks? Or with Vanessa, the best actor of them all, whom her father called ‘divinely mad’ with a conscience the ‘size of Grand Central Station’? Of these two books on the family Spoto’s is by far the more serious and ...”

“... directors of the Times were divided by Murdoch, and so failed miserably to intervene when Harold Evans was sacked as editor. Of the five independent directors in the case of the Observer, two are nominated by Lonrho, two by the Observer’s staff, and these four choose a fifth. The two nominated by Lonrho – on the advice of Lord Shawcross (of whom more ...”