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“... projects are at issue, and denied or even handled with prim embarrassment in scientific biography. Alan Cook is no professional historian. Professor of Geophysics at Edinburgh, then Jacksonian Professor of Natural Philosophy at Cambridge, he has devoted his life to the same sorts of precision project that structured Halley’s career, and this sprawling ...”

“... It is 35 years, almost to the day, that I first set eyes on Peter, at lunch in a restaurant, I think on Goodge Street, with Dudley Moore and Jonathan Miller, the meeting arranged by John Bassett, whose idea it was that we should all work together writing the review that turned into Beyond the Fringe. Having already written while still an undergraduate a large slice of the two West End shows Pieces of Eight and One Over the Eight, Peter was quite prosperous and it showed ...”

“... round for its justification and thinking he had found it bumped the country along with him. Robin Cook is careful always to give Blair the benefit of the doubt, saying that Blair really did believe Saddam had the weapons. I’m never sure, though, that Cook’s forbearance is not just an extension of the parliamentary ...”

“... Henry VIII had poisoning made treasonable by statute in order to have the bishop of Rochester’s cook boiled to death for poisoning the Lambeth Palace stew (a measure cited by Lord Hoffmann in the House of Lords’ debate on the Rwanda safety bill as an early example of unprincipled ad hoc legislation).Treason’s​ path, so far as it has had one, reaches ...”

“... people have for me. In the local post office where I go every morning for the papers I am ‘Mr Alan’, though Zaiman with his filmstar looks just calls me ‘Alan’ (and occasionally pats my arm). The English lady (from Kent) in Shepherd Foods who wears a burka calls me ‘Mr Bennett’ and because it’s the way ...”

“... more precisely what they sounded like’), or an Etonian in Dominica who had married his black cook (‘a most depraved-looking middle-aged man, straight out of Maugham, with the glazed eyes of a drug addict and the aggressive manner of the socially ostracised’): these are the phrases which best encapsulate his foreign journeys. Travel for Pope-Hennessy ...”

“... the same. I have been particularly struck by this on following up a reference to a paper by Alan Anderson published in the Bulletin of the Society of labour History in 1971 on the deliberations of the Legislative Committee set up by Baldwin’s Cabinet in the aftermath of the General Strike of 1926. Then, if ever, you might expect to have seen ...”

“... whose Book of Snobs appeared in 1848, and George Orwell – he has written biographies of both. Alan Bennett, who has the finest antennae for social nuance, is absent. So is Muriel Spark whose short story, ‘You Should Have Seen the Mess’, is a forensic analysis of the subject. It is narrated by a woman who has based every decision in her life on ...”

“... work. Whereas a play or whatever on TV would invariably prompt a tipsy telephone call from Peter Cook with congratulations that one had got away with it yet again, Jonathan and I were less indulgent, tending to ignore each other’s efforts. I never saw one of his operas and I’m not sure he ever saw one of my plays. He did try though, which is more than I ...”

“... the DETR, Prescott blusters and bungles away, the Peter Principle made flesh. Other ministers – Alan Milburn, David Blunkett, Stephen Byers – briefly shoot skywards, flare and fizzle. Through the passing show Mullin is by turns wryly amused and appalled, but often just alienated, a Meursault of the red boxes. Despite his Bennite past, the alienation is ...”

“... a superior version of this need. Some of his best observations, about unusual stars like Barbara Cook or Gwen Verdon, may mean little to British readers since the performers have not crossed the Atlantic, in the flesh or on celluloid. This makes Mordden’s inclusion of a lengthy ‘discography’, over forty pages, all the more useful since it will enable ...”

“... him away. How long after this it was that Bowie had his breakthrough I’m not sure.15 January. Alan Rickman dies. In the first week of The Habit of Art at the National in 2009 Michael Gambon, playing Auden, was taken ill and rushed to St Thomas’s. He recovered quite quickly, and indeed got out of the ambulance saying: ‘I know what they’re all doing ...”

“... 1961 in London’s Fortune Theatre where I was appearing with my colleagues and co-writers Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore in Beyond the Fringe.It was a smash hit, with every night the audience studded with celebrities, and accordingly at one performance there was the queen. My particular tour de force in the second half was an Anglican ...”

“... me.‘Aren’t you famous?’‘Well I can’t be, can I, if you don’t know my name.’‘It’s Alan something.’‘Yes.’‘From Scarborough?’‘No.’‘So which Alan are you?’‘I’m another Alan.’‘Are you just a lookalike?’‘Well, you could say so.’He pats my arm ...”

“... his home (not out of doors) for dinner with his gay household (three of them take it in turns to cook); they will talk until late (whereas the crazies have only phantoms to debate with). It is by such civil intimacies that our cities may be judged. It is one answer to MajorMan, the citizen as consumer. Perhaps Gunn wins our argument, then. The Man with Night ...”