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“... James Cagney had his moments of deadpan nastiness, but there’s the mother thing. Perhaps George Raft came close, but I suspect that’s more the result of moribund acting. There isn’t any doubt about Michael Rooker in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (one of the few good films I wish I’d never seen): as blank and merciless a psychopath as ...”

“... off after his beheading in 1649. In the catalogue, the curators, Per Rumberg and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, try to ask what kind of sensibility the exercise reveals. But as they themselves point out, it’s not clear whether the assembled canvases, panels, tapestries, miniatures and marbles can be read as testaments to any cohesive personal vision. It’s ...”

“... symbols of Englishness: the bulldog, and John Bull (here he draws heavily on the work of Miles Taylor). Both supposedly represented the same qualities of directness, determination and courage. In the case of the bulldog, which took its name from the grisly sport of bull-baiting rather than from any resemblance to the animal, these qualities seemed to be ...”

“... they remind Catholics to keep Clear of Republicanism, killings like these can be useful, as John Taylor, an MP from the ‘respcetable’ side of Unionism and a Minister of Home Affairs in the days of Stormont, has acknowledged. Another Stormont MP, now very happily deceased, took the logic of his strong feelings about Northern Catholics a stage further. In ...”

“... as shots of him felling trees sufficiently indicate. The designer axe was not far behind. Lloyd George, too, did his bit to lower the tone of politics once secularisation had made the pulpit an obsolescent model. As A. J. P. Taylor liked to point out, Lloyd George’s platform oratory ...”

“... of the Bible itself, and Clarke’s approach and title were echoed by the Dissenting divine John Taylor in an equally notorious interrogation of the Calvinist doctrine of salvation in The Scripture Doctrine of Original Sin (1740). Articles of religion were denounced as a quasi-Popish hangover which restricted the much-vaunted freedom of Protestants to ...”

“... were still more apparent in the actions he did not take. As Churchill had shown, and Lloyd George before him, 10 Downing Street could serve as the headquarters of a revolution in government. 1945 was meant to be the start of a great and lasting experiment in social and economic affairs. It was a moment when a prime minister of the calibre of Dalton or ...”

“... was one of the reasons why they had failed. But, thanks to the willingness of the publisher, George Smith, to lose £70,000 on an outlay of £100,000, the DNB, ‘in accord with the self-reliant temperament of the British race’, was ‘the outcome of private enterprise and the handiwork of private citizens’. Thus conceived and completed, embodying ...”

“... heritage, history, culture, tradition, community – and nationality’. Similarly, Charles Taylor reminds Nussbaum that democracy requires a strong national identity on the part of its citizens, and Michael Walzer insists that his circle of allegiances (‘spheres of affection’) starts, not with the outermost periphery, but at the ‘centre’. In a ...”

“... the other night, where were Tennyson, Browning, Anthony Trollope, Lord Houghton, Lord Stanley, Tom Taylor, Fitzjames Stephen ... with all of whom I had a pleasant gossip.’ With all of them? But even on such a loquacious evening he still spared a thought for ‘how much better worthy of such company dear Daniel would have been.’ His own receptions, held ...”

“... In an introduction to his Collected Film Poetry Tony Harrison recalls working with the director George Cukor on a ludicrously conceived and commercially unlucky movie version of Maeterlinck’s play The Blue Bird. The work starred Jane Fonda as Night, Ava Gardner as Luxury, and Elizabeth Taylor as Queen of Light and ...”

“... players had a weekly ‘Tuesday Club’, considered a bonding ritual by the players and manager George Graham alike. It was, in fact, a massive piss-up that started after training on Tuesday and carried on through Wednesday, ending in time to run it off on Thursday morning. This is the world Wenger inherited when he took over as Arsenal manager. After the ...”

“... actors in my first play, Forty Years On, which was running in the West End. One of the actors was George Fenton, who is doing the music for the film, and another was Keith McNally, the proprietor of Balthazar.15 January. The police officer who shot Mark Duggan is to be returned to firearms duty just as was the officer who shot Jean Charles de Menezes. The Met ...”

“... has a history involving dozens of paintings, stretching back to the early 18th century, when George Vertue identified the so-called Chandos portrait as an image of Shakespeare painted by a friend and fellow actor, John Taylor. Donated to the National Portrait Gallery in 1856, the Chandos is the only candidate to have ...”

“... discreditable’ – by having relationships with men in his company in an army which, as A.J.P. Taylor said, ‘kept its antique class structure inviolate’ – or that his homosexuality was more than a phase, ‘an outgrowth of his Uppingham education’. She claimed that he was ‘just deeply romantic about his friends, as musicians are’. While ...”