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“... of his body – and as unsafe. ‘Laurence Olivier is less gifted than Marlon Brando,’ wrote William Redfield in Letters from an Actor. ‘He is even less gifted than Richard Burton, Paul Scofield, Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud. But he is still the definitive actor of the 20th century. Why? Because he wanted to be.’ Holden’s book never reconciles ...”

“... ludicrously fake British accent that he reminds her of Thurston Howell III on Gilligan’s Island. William Styron is almost as monstrous as Hellman herself: self-centred, nervy, and savage with contempt for anyone who gets in his way. When he accidentally burns the fancy pan-fried quail he is preparing for Hellman and her friends in Hellman’s kitchen one ...”

“... tall, graceful buildings contain e.e. cummings, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.Eliot cast the longest shadow on the mid-century generation, not simply because of the brilliance of the poetry and essays: he was both the model and the anti-model for the New Criticism (espoused by Lowell and Jarrell’s teachers John ...”

“... was over the name. I favoured (homage to Izaak Walton) the Lea spelling, where they went for the (William) Burroughs-suggestive Lee. Inspector Lee. Willie Lee. Customised paranoia: double e, narrowed eyes glinting behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. The area alongside the M25, between Enfield Lock and High Beach, Epping Forest, carries another echo of ...”

“... in the summer of 1814, in which Cochrane and Cockburn sailed up the Potomac, dined in the White House on the banquet that the fleeing President Madison had left behind, then burned the city’s public buildings. Fifty years later, while protesting neutrality, Britain effectively sided with the South in the Civil War. Is it any wonder that in 1914 the ...”

“... until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups ...”

“... the powerful Wingfield family and passed into the service of Edward IV. Charles’s father was William Brandon, who according to the Paston letters got himself a bad reputation, ‘for that he should have by force ravished and swived an ancient gentlewoman, and yet was not therewith eased, but swived her oldest daughter, and then would have swived the ...”

“... was that woman. She dressed for court in a blue serge dress with a long grey cloak over it and a white chrysanthemum pinned to her breast. ‘She was the perfect witness,’ Humphreys wrote. ‘Neat and tidy in her appearance, polite and respectful in her answers, with just that twinge of feeling to be expected in a person who knows herself to be the victim ...”

“... wing of the CIA; J.C. King, chief of the clandestine wing’s Western Hemisphere Division; and William Hood, at that time chief of operations under King. Roman said she didn’t know why the 10 October cable made no mention of the FBI reports, but guessed (in Morley’s words) they ‘may have been circulating in other CIA offices and been unavailable to ...”

“... it is appropriate to cite the reaction of Mr Morel in Sons and Lovers after the death of his son William; it may even be authentically Arthur Lawrence’s.’ But what if Mr Morel’s reactions were not ‘authentically Arthur Lawrence’s’? – and there is no particular reason why they should be. Unlike some biographers, Worthen has at least been ...”

“... by a dose of old-fashioned condescension. He once did what he thought was a scorching job on William Whitelaw, but chanced to run across him shortly after in White’s Club. The columnist confesses to being horrified. Presumably he would never attack a man he knew he was lunching with next week. But Whitelaw soon has ...”

“... dissent makes a serviceable fit, here, with the popular anti-imperialism of Mark Twain, who with William James and others had organised the ‘Moratorium’ protest against America’s bullying conquest of the Philippine Islands in 1898. Twain detested the process by which America was being turned from a democratic republic, however corrupt and crude, into a ...”

“... the Falklands crisis of 1982. Then, he was propelled into a central role in dealing with the White House and the US media. As we now know, much more was offered by way of American support than appeared at the time. Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy is a very different kind of book, a study of two hundred years of international politics and of attempts to ...”

“... an Ethiopian conscript, its fingernails perfectly preserved, gropes at the sky from a forearm of white bone obscured at the elbow by khaki rags and tall, thin grass. This, and other evidence of fighting at close quarters, is dispassionately surveyed by columns of young fighters, dressed in tattered clothing and packing the standard Kalashnikov. Mid-morning ...”

“... changes that had come over the Royal Navy in the interval. In Nelson’s time it was possible for William Mitchell, a young seaman, to be flogged round the fleet, to survive it, to pass for lieutenant when he was about thirty, and to reach Nelson’s own rank of vice-admiral of the white in 1814. Yet even before 1814 ...”