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“... me after that 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 ...”

“... the wholesale destruction of posh cars and real estate. The spectre is sorrow. From Batman to James Bond, every hero is grieving, stricken by a loss from which he can’t recover, whether of parents, mistress, wife or daughter. He – it’s always a he, the women in these movies just get to be decorous or evil, much better options – is all twisted ...”

“... which was the forcing-ground for Lyall’s nominees. In this illuminating and well-written book Clive Dewey’s concern is to explore not merely the workings of nepotism but the operations of Church patronage in general, and to assess its social and political implications. Did the system, as he suggests, preserve the Church of England from disestablishment ...”

“... slow for the genre, and the tension keeps slackening into comedy. A small band of criminals led by Clive Owen has held up a bank in lower Manhattan and taken some forty hostages. Are they after the diamonds? Money? The banker’s Nazi papers? Something else? There are plenty of plot twists, but the comedy is much better than the tension was ever going to be. A ...”

“... similarly gruelling routines had to be rolled around the palate and the tongue many a time before Clive James suddenly exclaimed: “A Shropshire Cunt by A.E. Sockprong”.’ I have a Y chromosome, so I can just about see that this is funny. But I can’t imagine that it was enough, as Hitchens suggests, ‘to make the long interludes of puerility ...”

“... would have caused no consternation among listeners who included Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell. Nor, perhaps, would Forster’s own discomfort with the question of Sex, which played a large, complicated part in his own life: ‘You work it out,’ his essay goes on: ‘I can’t so well.’ Increasingly anguished by the implications of his ...”

“... foreign office as a place staffed by clerks who could write a good hand, but twenty years earlier, James Mill, Examiner of Correspondence at India House, was already like the permanent head of a 20th-century foreign office. He invented policy over a broad range, and when officials went out to knock India into a modern shape, it was ...”

“... reoccupied the East India Company’s settlement in Calcutta. In June a force led by Robert Clive deposed Siraj after defeating him in a battle near Plassey (Palashi), helped by the defection of the nawab’s key advisers and financial backers to the British side. The first account of the ‘Black Hole’ – as the room where the soldiers were ...”

“... Thanks to Clive Wilmer among others, an exhibition of paintings, sculptures, photographs and printed material bearing on Pound’s interests in ‘the visual arts’ was mounted for the Cambridge Poetry Festival on 14 June, and could be seen in Cambridge’s not sufficiently renowned Kettle’s Yard Gallery until 4 August; it will now be at the Tate from 11 September to 10 November ...”

“... disappears behind them.’ Yet she had no self-confidence, none of the lordly conviction of Henry James or James Joyce; she awaited both reviews and the comments of her friends in a perfect pathos of fear and trembling, and each new attempt at a book was wholly tentative and unsure. Her ideas were all in the form of an ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... at Windsor.) There were also some alarming attempts at cross-breeding. In 1773, Lord Robert Clive was determined that his zebra mare should mate with an ass. The zebra ‘shewed great disgust’ but Clive persevered: the ass was painted with stripes, ‘whereupon she accepted him’. (The mule that resulted from this ...”

“... of baked beans, cling peaches and custard powder, the staples of such occasions, and which, as Clive James noted, will later be distributed among the poor and devout old ladies who contributed them in the first place. A truer symbol of the locality’s harvest would, I suppose, be a sheaf of emails or a roll of print-outs, electronics round here more ...”

“... who determines exactly what they want? Modern Times ranges from ‘Neurotic Boy Outsiders’ (James Dean, Anthony Perkins et al) to ‘The Fairisle Years’ (Chariots of Fire, Brideshead Revisited), with passing looks at Babytime, Bryan Ferry, Reactionary Chic, and Not Shaving. The most substantial part of York’s book is ‘Designtime’, an anatomy of ...”

“... club, Summertown Stars, and sent me to the local Church of England school, St Philip and St James. I was already a competitive, sport-obsessed child, and responded to the sense of cultural difference by exaggerating it. During a classroom discussion – I can’t remember about what exactly – I quoted the great Green Bay Packers football coach, Vince ...”