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“... with power divided between controllers, strand editors and regional department heads. Troy Kennedy Martin’s 1985 anti-nuclear six-parter Edge of Darkness was commissioned by the head of serials, Jonathan Powell, produced by the Birmingham regional drama head, Michael Wearing, and scheduled before Martin had finished the scripts. Third, as a result of ...”

“... who warmly sympathised with Hitler’s politics. (How many of these people also know that John F. Kennedy was an early supporter of America First?) But the underlying question was not whether Trump was giving a secret signal to anti-Semites – among his biggest supporters are the prime minister of Israel and the mayor of Jerusalem – but rather what he ...”

“... driven by the cult of celebrity’: just think of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Mark Bolan, President Kennedy (‘a special kind of car crash’) or Princess Diana. In 1970, shortly before he began writing the novel, Ballard decided to ‘test my hypothesis about the unconscious links between sex and the car crash by putting on an exhibition of crashed ...”

“... of chuckling over La Vie Parisienne, doubtless introduced into Windsor Castle by her problem son David, Prince of Wales. The Queen disapproved of the Prince of Wales’s liaisons with other men’s wives. At one time she had the curious notion of installing Lord Louis Mountbatten in York House, the Prince’s residence, apparently in order to spread the ...”

“... have glamorous political leaders who run the same risks as any star of stage and screen. The Kennedy brothers may not have been killed for reasons that resemble those that influenced Chapman: we can do no more than wonder about an element of duality or identification here. But misery and mania do seem to have played a part in their deaths. Misery and ...”

“... all separate in our bodies, all nobody to each other and everything to ourselves.’ Readers of David Plante’s novels may recognise this brand of solipsism, half stricken, half thrilled. It would be untrue to say that the conviction of solitariness goes untested in the course of the book, but by the end it has been vindicated at least as much as argued ...”

“... Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American Republic’. The errors of Wolff’s book, and its stylistic shortcomings, were said to be indicative of deeper flaws in Michael Wolff the man: was ...”

“... embody ‘MAGA: The Next Generation’. JD Vance, formerly known as James Donald Bowman, James David Hamel and J.D. Vance, now strangely rebranded without the stops, is a self-styled ‘hillbilly’ whose backwoods was Middletown, Ohio, an industrial suburb of Cincinnati (pop. 50,987), where he went from poverty to Yale Law School. He wrote a bestselling ...”

“... among them the Nazi-nostalgic François Genoud, Himmler’s masseur Felix Kersten and the young David Irving – to whom he initially gave more trust than they deserved. As Colin Kidd has suggested, Trevor-Roper had a curious weakness for con men. He found them fascinating. But he overestimated his own ability to see through them, and underestimated the ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... and unfit houses’ in Manchester, 15,000 in Oldham, 5000 in Rochdale and 80,000 in Liverpool. David Kynaston cites these figures in his new book, On the Cusp: Days of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition ...”

“... Davenport-Hines ignores the American dimension. He doesn’t discuss the dismay in Washington when Kennedy’s men discovered the scandal was about to break. How had Macmillan allowed things to reach this point? Robert McNamara, the secretary of defence, was especially appalled, knowing what he did about the access Profumo had been granted. Davenport-Hines ...”

“... rather like reports from less-than-overwhelmed referees. Asa Briggs is dismissed in a few lines; David Landes is damned with the faint praise of ‘considerable literary skills and a certain old-fashioned rhetoric’; and Lord Dacre is rapped on the knuckles for failing to write a big book on the Enlightenment. Such comments are more revealing of their ...”

“... into the nether regions is frequently heroic and, in achieving it, he is ennobled but emasculated. David Goodis is the laureate of this mood. William Kennedy, a more recent mythologist of hobo as artist, has seen his novel Ironweed make it all the way to the screen, where Jack Nicholson was obliged to continue his ...”

“... in which Uriah Heep – ‘looking flabby and lead-coloured in the moonlight’ – explains to David Copperfield the experiences that showed him the value of being ’umble. ‘Dickens was a great connoisseur of hypocrisy,’ she writes, ‘yet he was not obsessive about it ... Why has his sense of humanity been so rare? Why are people so overwhelmed by ...”