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“... would be that she is reporting some years after the events while certain of her colleagues went straight out from the Cabinet Room and fed the press. Cabinet secrecy is not, indeed, so well preserved that one needs to condemn overt leaking long after the event. I cannot think of anyone who really suffers from it. True, now it has been done, it will ...”

“... the Germans somewhere in occupied Europe. But where? The tip of the Tunisian peninsula pointed straight at Sicily, only a hundred miles distant, and the island was an obvious base for British and American bombers to launch attacks on mainland Italy. In Churchill’s words, ‘Everyone but a bloody fool would know it was Sicily.’ The Germans were no ...”

“... of what he once called ‘evening’s empire’, and in his capacity to make it simple, to say it straight. He knows that love can come. He can renew. ‘Hamlet is a name,’ wrote William Hazlitt in 1817, ‘his speeches and sayings but the idle coinage of the poet’s brain. What then, are they not real? They are as real as our own thoughts. Their reality ...”

“... more – this is a very broad generalisation and counter-examples could be adduced – towards straight imposts on foodstuffs, including bread. The point is simple: whether or not the well-to-do mercantile folk were really prospering more – and this is debatable – they clearly have fewer inhibitions about displaying prosperity and differentiating ...”

“... were hardly surprising in communities where the blood and unwanted body parts of animals flowed straight out of butcher shops and leather tanners, where the castration of livestock was a common occurrence, and where hogs, above all, served many purposes – culinary and linguistic. When a farmer paid for a military replacement he ‘bought a pig’ (cochon ...”

“... with the implication that, yes it can, and hey, what about this one; while elsewhere, no doubt straight-ahead action-loving male readers may have been on board with James Earl Ray, but they were miffed to find so much Antonio Muñoz Molina. Both objections seemed plausible to me; they might even have been calculated to appeal to me as a reader. I don’t ...”

“... aged 78, Kinglake in 1891, aged 82) but play very different roles in the 20th-century imagination. Michael Collie, the more severe of Borrow’s new biographers, notes the instructions Borrow’s publisher gave him when he was writing The Bible in Spain: he was told to report his remarkable achievements, experiences and skills ‘in a natural manner, as if ...”

“... tell the truth. And telling the truth is not just telling lies about your enemies: it is talking straight to your friends. It means the avoidance of bad faith ... The Gramscian intellectual, facing a moral dilemma over truth-telling within a political organisation, will feel that the cause and the organisation must always come first. But the Orwellian will ...”

“... When 19-year-old Rider Haggard, an underachiever straight from the crammer, secured his first job in 1875, his mother addressed an earnest poem to him. He had now finished drifting ‘adown Life’s vernal tide’ and faced a stiffer challenge. ‘Rise to thy destiny!’ she exhorted. ‘Awake thy powers!’ His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer ...”

“... the Kavanagh book landed me in a mess of puzzles. Peter Kavanagh, the poet’s brother, starts straight off, sentence one, by announcing: ‘When I write about Patrick Kavanagh I write as a partisan, as his alter ego, almost as his evangelist.’ And if you think that’s a dubious basis for a biography, what about this? As far as possible I shall avoid ...”

“... strategy has to deliver; while two treatments of Caravaggio, by Andrew Graham-Dixon and by Michael Fried, come at that painter’s place in history from wildly disparate angles. Spear, Sohm and their five coauthors investigate five 17th-century urban art worlds. Those of Florence and Venice are so downbeat they would be the despair of most ...”

“... were the doubles of the President they served. ‘I am bringing you a playmate your own age,’ Michael Deaver is supposed to have said when he informed the President that his Secretary of the Treasury, Regan, and his Chief of Staff, Jim Baker, were trading places. Struck at their very first meeting by the similarity in their names, Reagan had told Regan a ...”

“... Bate also discussed in a deeply unconvincing Sunday Telegraph article headlined ‘Shakespeare Was Straight’), attempting to convict the poet Samuel Daniel’s sister of multiple adultery on circumstantial evidence that wouldn’t have persuaded Othello. She was married to John Florio, another protégé of Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton: Bate ...”

“... The continuing American blindness to Vietnam itself, in this and many other instances, notably Michael Cimino’s film The Deer Hunter (1978), can be astonishing, but the myth also shows some genuine self-understanding. Apocalypse Now, in particular, is full of the sense that Americans exported whole chunks of their culture to Vietnam and discovered its ...”

“... him, and also knows the rest of the band don’t want to know. His job is to keep them on the straight and narrow, so they can be more outrageous and wild and creative and artistic, and they despise him for it, or worse still forget he’s even there. Years on, bass players reflect on how the whole thing was thrown back in their face: sacked for being too ...”