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“... a fraction of the material available to the editor. Readers may find it useful to have at hand Ian Hamilton’s masterly biography, first published in 1983, if only to provide more continuity, close some of the gaps in the story. He is thorough, lucid and just (admiring and condemning), and it is a bonus that his comments on the poetry – after all, our ...”

“... credible chains of motive and causation were beyond him. He was a writer of the ‘With one bound, Jack was free’ school; the gun that inexplicably jams, the knock at the door at the very second the blade is about to fall were his stock-in-trade. But abundance trumps incoherence, and it can’t be denied that an awful lot happens in The Forbidden ...”

“... bloke of a building … cantilevered pot belly poking out over tight trousers’. Its architect, Ian Simpson, has a magnificent and probably iconic light entertainer’s bouffant. His work, too, is on an epic orchestral scale: fittingly brash and boorish, now thrilling, now corny. Like the late Ricardo Bofill he suggests that singular talent and gleeful ...”

“... society hostess, was that evening minding her own business in her own nice home in the company of Jack Nicholson and three hundred others. She had, understandably, drawn the line at Rupert and Min, who seem to have been upset by this. Rupert’s idea of a Water Board worker was a man with an Irish accent. He tried out his ‘vague leprechaun lilt’ on Nona ...”

“... greeted with a gleeful salvo of puns and bon-mots, an echo of which can be heard in the title of Ian Kelly’s splendid new biography. Ever the theatrical opportunist, he was soon back onstage, with a new prosthesis and two new comedies fit for purpose: The Lame Lover, in which he played the lecherous Sir Luke Limp; and The Devil upon Two Sticks, a satire on ...”

“... of the deportation order against the adopted Nepalese, Jay Khadka, by – of all people – Jack Straw. Within a few days, hospital closures had been suspended, as had the privatisation of High Street post offices. None of it earth-shattering, much of it largely symbolic, but combined with the shifts in government style and culture, the initial effect ...”

“... Labour with being the friend of the criminal. Not to be outdone, the Shadow Home Secretary, Jack Straw, has responded with attacks on squeegee merchants and beggars. And now the Tories have announced their latest law and order initiative: a war against ‘yob culture’. At the same time as it calls for a stronger state to solve the problem of ‘Our ...”

“... it. While Young writes at length about one of the acknowledged masterpieces of British cinema, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents, an adaptation of Turn of the Screw, they turn instead to The Nightcomers (1971), a characteristically lurid offering from Michael Winner in which Marlon Brando and Stephanie Beacham take on the roles of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel ...”

“... and the formidable Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral Godfrey, and his assistant Ian Fleming. Their meetings must have been fun. Godfrey, brilliant but acerbic, called the RAF the Royal Advertisement Service, and dismissed the Army as the ‘evacuees’, the people the Navy had had to fish out of the sea at Dunkirk, Crete and ...”

“... a degree thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and ...”

“... Early on, they single out their adversaries as, pre-eminently, Shula Marks, Geoff Berridge and Jack Spence. ‘For some scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorising, and hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to the ...”

“... not?’ The sneers continued all the same, and when, a little over three years later, Jack Lang invited Barthes to lunch with François Mitterrand, Barthes worried that accepting would be viewed as a craven attempt to make amends. Mitterrand enjoyed chatting with people like Barthes, but the lunch also appeared to be aimed at brushing some ...”

“... just a small team left to protect the core leadership from assassination.’ It looked as though Ian Paisley’s DUP and Sinn Féin were about to do a deal on decommissioning, and that Stormont, the Northern Irish Assembly, would be resumed. In October 2002 four Sinn Féin government officials (one of them the party’s chief administrator at Stormont, the ...”

“... including Piano (to quash the perfectly sound rumour that the partnership was breaking up) and Jack Zunz, chairman of Arups. During the discussions Ian Finlay, the Deputy Chairman of Lloyd’s, met Marco Goldschmied, a partner in the practice, in the washroom. He asked if Rogers would give them something that looked like ...”

“... and narrator, for this narrator is never resolved into a character. Here he is meeting one ‘Jack Verso’, an American academic who is on the trip boasting about his mission to ‘deconstruct the Grand Narratives of the great Age of Reason project’ (he is even given a baseball cap sporting the motto ‘I Love Deconstruction’). ‘I know his type at ...”