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“... News International over the past year have given us many memorable moments, but Rupert and James Murdoch’s appearance before the Culture, Media and Sport Committee of the House of Commons last July is first among them. While James cut a predictably bitter figure, his octogenarian father could hardly have seemed ...”

“... New Labour told government press officers at the outset. Less well remembered perhaps is Alastair Campbell’s creation of a head of ‘story development’. The post of official fabulist was filled by Paul Hamill, who would play an inglorious role in the fabrication of the Dodgy Dossier of September 2002.We weren’t careful what we half-wished for. We did ...”

“... the last phrase that was spoken to them. In this mode they recall not Ibsen and Chekhov but Henry James, who could create a riddle out of any old banality: ‘Well, I see everyone at my place.’ ‘Everyone?’ The trouble with such instant creation of depths is that the whole world looks shallow after a while. Is The Cryptogram shallow? It’s ...”

“... techniques of honey-trapping, blackmail and counter-intelligence in a manner that owed more to James Bond plots than to psychometrics. Throwaway remarks, that the candidate is just a ‘puppet’ to the campaign team and that ‘facts’ are less important than ‘emotion’, look shady when caught on a hidden camera, but they’re not categorically ...”

“... If Lang’s truncated life ever was made into a movie, this scene might open it.As Rosa Campbell points out in her introduction to The Miraculous Season, a new and expanded selection of Lang’s poems (Carcanet, £16.99), she has long ‘languished in the margins of American literary history; a footnote to the rise and rise of the New York School of ...”

“... below and green above. The right-hand figure has something of the rubbery smugness of one of James Thurber’s femmes fatales. The trees – orange, green, pink, yellow – are a little like those in Gauguin’s Tahitian landscapes. Matisse had become a law unto himself. He had learnt to follow his own responses to his ‘crude’ colour, to his ...”

“... Like his elder contemporary Henry James, Eça de Queirós belongs to the small and distinguished group of 19th-century novelists who wrote in exile. He was born in 1845 in a remote town of northern Portugal, but spent most of his working life in England and France. He liked to maintain that his novels were fundamentally French, and that he himself was French in everything but his fondness for ballad-singers and cod with onions ...”

“... of judges who wanted to make a reality of human rights it has taken wing. A peevish essay here by James Allan criticises them for deciding that, even though they cannot interfere with incompatible legislation, they can at least declare that it is incompatible. For such critics I doubt whether judges can do anything right. As to South Africa, which, with the ...”

“... metallic brocades with which their heraldic costumes were decorated. Charles Dickens, Henry James, Bram Stoker, Ulysses S. Grant, Toulouse-Lautrec, Lillie Langtry, Robert Mitchum and Jean Cocteau were also on the books. Some of their accounts are closed, crossed out with lines of red ink and marked ‘Dead’. Grand Duke Sergei of Russia’s reads ...”

“... of superiority to fashion, publicity, even print itself. Sterne affected no such loftiness. Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ‘engaged ...”

“... of Oxford often unsettled the Presbyterian certainties of the Balliol Scotch; Archibald Campbell Tait, an exhibitioner of a previous generation, even ended up as the archbishop of Canterbury. As a Scottish Episcopalian, Lang had no Calvinism to shed, but he opposed the efforts of Oxford’s rising liberals to tidy up Christianity. He found Benjamin ...”

“... have to satisfy the demands of the all-powerful and long-serving head of CIA counter-intelligence, James Jesus Angleton, who has recently died. The undeniably brilliant Angleton was also at least half-crazy. He saw moles everywhere and had paralysed the CIA for years on end with his frenetic witch-hunting. (One CIA officer wrote a bitter report suggesting that ...”

“... its threats to expose the identities and whereabouts of the two boys who had killed the toddler James Bulger and were now about to be released. Nothing in her decision turned on a confidential relationship – there was none – between the youths and the press: what mattered was the nature of the information and the risk it posed to their privacy and ...”

“... he worked mostly by letter, was Ellen Terry. And there were more actresses, among them Mrs Patrick Campbell, some married and some not. He had a taste for actresses, and for other distinguished women. He refused to follow the way of the world and ‘substitute custom for conscience’, but some thought his sexual preferences, however proper by his own ...”

“... their charm, like credits in early films which “introduce” Shirley Temple, Marilyn Monroe or James Dean. But they didn’t in the end quite merit selection.’) The book is organised thematically, and if it isn’t immediately clear why a piece in praise of cats comes under ‘Religion, Politics and Philosophy’ instead of, say, ‘Autobiography and ...”