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“... What​ have the Romans ever done for us?’ John Cleese asks in Monty Python’s Life of Brian. His audience, not realising his question is rhetorical, replies: aqueducts, sanitation, medicine, public order, etc etc. Guy de la Bédoyère, on the other hand, doesn’t need a list: the Romans’ most important legacy, he suggests in his new book, is literacy, and specifically the habit of written memorialisation ...”

“... He doesn’t tell us the title, but he does name the author: ‘Charles Dickens … seriously old guy, dead and a foreigner, but Christ Jesus did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over and nobody giving a rat’s ass. You’d think he was from around here.’You might suppose that the narrator could be referring to any one of several ...”

“... Bennet claims that for many such people, medicine satisfies an immature hankering to play the big guy, basking in glory, the apparent self-sacrifices involved assuaging feelings of guilt and providing ego-defence. The heroics of the operating-theatre or the ‘fire brigade’ drama of the emergency call gratify Boy’s Own Paper cravings for adventure, and ...”

“... Campbell, exhack, ex-alcoholic, ex-pornographer, all-round thug and family-values man. What a guy! William Hague meanwhile is not a great man and behind him is Sebastian Coe. Lately, however, he has employed the services of another gorgeous ex-hack, Amanda Platell, fun-loving Aussie, the femme fatale of the Mirror Group, ex-editor of the Sunday ...”

“... life was derived from that visit,’ Kenner wrote after McLuhan died. Around the same time, Guy Davenport, a young Rhodes Scholar, was spending the summer tramping around France and Italy with a recently made friend, Christopher Middleton. They had only two books with them, a collection of Donne’s poems and Pound’s Cantos. ‘Neither of us, I ...”

“... year. These new clients are people who, ‘like the rest of us’, as one of their volunteers, John Monaghan, says, ‘were living on 110 per cent of their salaries’; this year, something in the working situation has changed, and they cannot manage their usual debts, mortgage, car, credit card. Monaghan is also worried about the effect of the recent ...”

“... isn’t convinced by the case for voting for a lesser evil. ‘The suffering’, Noam Chomsky and John Halle wrote in June, that Trump’s ‘extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalised and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency’. My father ...”

“... narrator watches Paraday endure the invasive attentions of a rich hostess, Mrs Weeks Wimbush; of Guy Walsingham, a female novelist posing as a man; and of Dora Forbes, ‘an indubitable male’ pretending to be a woman writer, ‘florid and bald’, with ‘a big red moustache’ and ‘showy knickerbockers’. (‘In the age we live in,’ the narrator ...”

“... us would think that a beheading is a far greater threat than a sunburn.’ They could have picked John Kasich, a former Congressman and Fox News host, currently governor of Ohio. Known throughout his career as a phlegmatic and abusive man, widely disliked in Congress, he underwent an image makeover for the presidential campaign. He became, in his own words, a ...”

“... were one of US, but you ratted!’, wasn’t far away. Nor were all the flats and pubs where Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean had told people exactly what they were, and at the top of their voices. But the reaction was always much the same, always the nanny’s pursed lip: ‘Overtired again! Don’t look at Master ...”

“... of a coat; and, with a friend from down our street, begging outside Woolworths. ‘Penny for the Guy,’ we cried, feebly, like a pair of Victorian urchins.Our haul – usually four or five pounds – was spent on one thing. ‘Light up the sky with Standard Fireworks!’ the TV advert sang, an invitation received like a command. All children knew the story ...”

“... of this year Tony Benn took part in a radio discussion on the working of Parliament, together with John Biffen and Roy (Lord) Jenkins. Asked by the chairman, Peter Hennessy, if he did not think that the Lords now functioned as a ‘focus of opposition’, Benn responded that it was, instead, ‘part of an attack on democracy. After all, why bother to vote in ...”

“... Charles I.A clear path runs from such writings to Milton’s little-read History of Moscovia and Guy Miege’s Relation of a 1663 embassy to Russia (a mission that included Marvell) because Russia was taken to be paradigmatic of the grandeur and fragility of empire. The tsar’s possessions had been growing before Henry VIII became an imperial monarch, and ...”

“... is, you’re in a restaurant and a man and his wife are having an argument and all of a sudden the guy gets mad at her, he picks up a fork and stabs her in the face. That’s really crazy and comic-bookish – but it also happens ... I am interested in the act, in the explosion, and in the entire aftermath of that. What do we do after this? Do we beat up the ...”

“... the 19th and 20th centuries. He wrote outstanding biographies of such Liberal leaders as Asquith, John Morley and Haldane, concluding with A.G. Gardiner, long-time editor of the Daily News. He then gave up political biography and wrote an enormous two-volume work on The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. It is difficult enough to write the ...”