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“... with the song of beautiful and vehement birds with names like Major Mitchell’s Cockatoo. When Barry Humphries squawked the other day that he had been pleased to find that Canberra had become a little ‘sleazy’, he was joking. Out of this garden city of good government, on 22 June 1983, flew a telex which read: ‘There appears to be no action which the ...”

“... outclassing the dismal and anonymous contributions from modern British sculptors – where’s Barry Flanagan when you need him? Jake and Dinos Chapman? Antony Gormley RA? But as I moved around Room 1, which contains perhaps the most far-flung group of human figures ever gathered in close proximity, quite different features of bronze became apparent: its ...”

“... in twenty years than Yaddo did in a hundred. And Bernie Katz, son of the South London gangster Brian ‘Little Legs’ Clifford, ran the Groucho as a pit stop for the perpetually wounded. (Bernie admitted that when he went into the bedroom where his father had been shot to death by two masked men, he didn’t hesitate: ‘I sashayed over to his ...”

“... upper-middle class, in fact. Ann Thwaite points out that the tyrannically aristocratic Sir Brian Botany, in Now we are six, is humiliated by his social inferiors, and comforted after his discomfiture by finding his right level as ‘plain Mr Botany, B’. The strange thing about the popularity of Milne’s children’s books is the obviously reassuring ...”

“... Great Famine became morbid nostalgia. One of the half-dozen best Irish plays of the 20th century, Brian Friel’s Translations, evoked a few well-bred sneers from the Dublin literati for being set in 19th-century Irish-speaking Donegal. The play also takes the odd swipe at the British, which in liberal middle-class Irish circles is equivalent to cavorting ...”

“... died out completely. There was never much social comment in Monty Python (until they made Life of Brian), but the (Oxbridge-educated) Not the Nine O’Clock News team at the beginning of the 1980s sometimes aimed for satire, and Armando Iannucci (University College, Oxford) has blazed such a trail through broadcast comedy in recent years that no one would ...”

“... say I am a genius too’) and Ambrose Silk from Put Out More Flags steps forward, in the form of Brian Howard, into the glare of the chemist’s counter to buy drugs (‘It was me introduced him to dollies’). Finally there is the mainstay ‘boy’, Kiki (‘My boy just left, and I can now write with the philosophic serenity of an empty scrotum’), later ...”

“... takes place that will not finally be redeemed and retrieved. As the self-educated inventor Fred T. Barry assures our eponymous hero: ‘Human being [sic] always treat blizzards as though they were the end of the world.’ But the raging storms that have swept over the plains of the Middle West are due to vanish without trace, or without significant ...”

“... play his game with them. It is tempting to think that Shaw wrote John Bull’s Other Island and Brian Friel wrote Translations with Kiberd watching over them, egging them on. Both plays are full of the paradoxes proposed by England in Ireland and Ireland in England. The drama comes from the identity games which colonised and coloniser will play, the masks ...”

“... in 1993 fell well for them. (Among the lucky LWT managers, incidentally, were Melvyn Bragg, Barry Cox and Greg Dyke. They provided most of the £79,000 Tony Blair spent on his campaign to become Labour leader. Bragg was ennobled by New Labour, Cox is a senior executive in the ITV network and Dyke’s contributions to Labour funds are not likely to ...”

“... the same year as Fraser, concentrated on British artists, such as Phillip King, William Tucker, Barry Flanagan, Paul Huxley and later Bridget Riley, whereas Fraser covered British, American and European art. John Kasmin, who opened his gallery the following year, dealt in British and American art. He and Fraser were the rivals for supremacy. Kasmin came ...”

“... very original,’ Dylan reported. ‘I knew what he meant, but I thought just the opposite.’) Brian Jones played the album for Keith Richards, who thought he was listening to two guitarists. (‘It took me a long time to realise he was actually doing it all by himself,’ Richards said.) The Rolling Stones used Johnson’s songs to convey melancholy and ...”

“... in preaching in the open air’. During the Second World War he was a student at the Barry School of Evangelism in South Wales and his tutor in open-air preaching was an ex-boxer. He had his prize gold belt always at the gospel meetings. He used to swing that great gold belt, which he won as the welterweight for the South of England, around his ...”

“... fact is he didn’t. From Darwin’s scientific difficulties to those afflicting his theory today: Brian Leith’s handbook of doubts about Darwinism is a succinct and opportune review of the latest critiques of neo-Darwinian gradualism, written, as befits a BBC producer, to put the intelligent layman in the picture. His survey of the literature (ranging from ...”

“... who would now be seen a natural performer for the television age, Patrick Moore channelled by Brian Blessed, sinks a shaft in Sussex, going deeper than anyone has gone before, to prove that ‘the world upon which we live is itself a living organism, endowed … with a circulation, a respiration, and a nervous system of its own.’ Challenger’s dig ...”