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“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... predominate, and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography ...”

“... which to oversee executive discretion, a task that the courts here already have well in hand, as Michael Howard and other ministers would be the first angrily to testify. This is not the prize that most advocates of the Convention are after. What excites them is the notion that after incorporation the judiciary would be able to strike down Parliamentary ...”

“... and T.E. Lawrence, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, F.R. and Q.D. Leavis, Elizabeth Bowen and Virginia Woolf – this is just a small sampling. Basically, he read his way through the Marylebone public library. He periodically put this marathon on hold to sprint through examinations. What on earth was he doing? Fending off the boredom of teenage life, of ...”

“... psychology – as opposed to the psychology of types – was an interest in form. The composer Michael Friedman, who died much too young last year, left a list of column topics which included the thought that ‘I seriously think Murder of Roger Ackroyd is the great modernist novel.’ It is possible to have an argument over the exact delineation of the ...”

“... Two events of the last year have attracted a lot of notice. One is the production of Michael Hastings’s play, Tom and Viv, and the other the publication of Peter Ackroyd’s biography, T.S. Eliot. They of course share a subject, the poet himself. But this choice of subject, the life of the writer with perhaps the biggest public image of any in our time, suggests something else they have in common ...”

“... or their doctors seems to have advised them to stay together, while many (including Virginia Woolf, Hope Mirrlees and Ottoline Morrell) seem to have supported their separation. Remembering that Vivien radiated ‘absolute terror’ and was herself ‘terrifying’, Mirrlees recalled how, while Eliot and his wife still lived together, ‘at the end of an ...”

“... has much of the elder sister in him.’ Klaus finally killed himself in 1949, as did his brother Michael in 1977. It was perhaps some consolation for Mann, as he tried to deal with Heinrich, that he could move the problems between them away from the merely personal into the public realm. In 1919, he wrote to a friend that it was ‘an opposition of ...”

“... reputation emerged unscathed (‘all those cheerless craps between 1900 and 1930 – Ginny Woolf and Dai Lawrence and Morgy Forster’). It is perhaps not surprising that the publication of their letters did not exactly enhance the contemporary standing of either author, but, quite apart from the faux-naif priggishness of much of the disapproval, there ...”

“... was going through Vanessa Redgrave’s mind every time she referred to her screen husband as ‘Michael’, the name of her own father, whose sexual nature was more complicatedly divided. The third section of The Sparsholt Affair is set in London, with Johnny Sparsholt now 21, his surname causing a stir wherever it’s mentioned. He explores London while ...”

“... and placed in new arrangements. What was done when we weren’t looking? They are ready for Woolf’s travesty of a biography, where ‘all the little figures – for they are rather under life size – will begin to move and speak, and we will arrange them in all sorts of patterns of which they were ignorant.’What is strange about such images isn’t ...”

“... books about Haig and Kitchener, VAD nurses, brave dead subalterns and monocled mutineers. I read Michael Hurd’s desolating biography – The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney – on the train to Edinburgh, the city where the nerve-wracked composer, on his way to insanity and death, was hospitalised after being gassed in 1917. I stared at the few surviving pictures of ...”

“... arrival, when the non-Aryan proportion in its membership had seemed to many unnecessarily high.’ Michael Barber, Powell’s earlier biographer, who first pointed out these passages, sensibly did not make too much of them. Like offhand dismissals of democracy, casual expressions of antisemitism were comme il faut in the upper classes of the period, a lightly ...”

“... with a publisher with authors like James, Strindberg, Ford and Belloc historically on its list. As Michael Barber, an earlier biographer of Powell, without access to his archives, remarked, it was a period where a little privilege went a long way. There is no reason to doubt that at least in his first year in the capital, Powell felt at sea in London, of ...”

“... were growing up, the only old framed photograph my brothers and I ever saw was of my grandfather Michael, a hero of the Second World War. And that’s always the way he was described to us, a war hero, the man who tried to save his Glasgow compatriots on HMS Forfar when it was struck by two torpedoes in December 1940. Except that story wasn’t true ...”