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“... is nothing with stronger criminal intent than the genteel purloining of a typescript, except in Desmond Hogan’s ‘Elysium’, where the heroine shacks up with an Irish terrorist. Hogan inclines towards a rather woozy poetry, but at least he reaches beyond the domestic mode omnipresent in the other stories: An outrage was done in this house once. A young ...”

“... and, occasionally, terror. Halley’s comet appears on the Bayeux Tapestry as a harbinger of King Harold’s doom. It was probably first spotted by the ever-watchful Chinese. In 840 AD an imperial edict in China forbade astronomers to mix ‘with civil servants and common people in general’ lest their knowledge of these terrible objects incite popular ...”

“... at West Dean during Willie’s lifetime. Edward denied this on the grounds that not only was the King always accompanied by either Queen Alexandra or Mrs Keppel, but Willie James was too honourable to perform the role of mari complaisant – although, again according to Edward, he accepted that his youngest daughter Audrey was the child of Sir Edward ...”

“... is likely to ring hollow in a down-at-heel colony. Contemporary Irish philosophers like William Desmond and Joseph Dunne have inherited this anti-rationalist bias, either in postmodern or Wittgensteinian mode. It says much about this wariness of pure reason that Toland, the country’s most militant rationalist thinker, also traded in the occult. (He was ...”

“... on the railways. No, 350,000 German soldiers, said Colonel Driscoll DSO, working as moles. The King spoke of his nephew the Kaiser planning to land an army corps and proclaim that, as a grandson of Queen Victoria, he was ready to free the King from ‘the Socialistic gang which is ruining the country’; Parliament voted ...”

“... universities; old South African exiles like the actor Anthony Sher, the ex-clergyman Cosmas Desmond – now the only white man on the PAC list – and Ronald Segal, once editor of the Penguin Africa Library, now bitterly inveighing against the Coloureds for their refusal to vote for the ANC. Such people – I’m one myself – feel they want to be here ...”

“... bias’ in overruling planning inspectors and the local council to approve Richard Desmond’s Westferry Printworks development – 24 hours before the introduction of hefty new levies that would have cost the Conservative donor an estimated £45 million. A few weeks earlier, Desmond, the former owner of the ...”

“... Henry England, a.k.a. Hal Nine (aristocracy). Henry is ‘in a ridiculous situation’: he is King of England. More precisely, he is Henry IX. (We are in a parallel universe. And perhaps, in another parallel universe, a parallel Martin Amis is dreaming up a potplant-lecturing, tampon-envying Charles III.) Henry has a tremendously posh voice (‘My ...”

“... approval’ of ‘wits so exquisite and discriminating’ as Raymond Mortimer, Noël Coward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor; on the publication of a book of poems a flurry of plaudits – ‘grimly entertaining’, ‘brilliantly funny and intimate’ – is produced. Barbera and McBrien summarise and categorise her output according to theme; they treat her ...”

“... Since his case has remained uncontested by the entire musical profession and most critics (though Desmond Shawe-Taylor finds it ‘hard to decide’), the licence-payer is entitled to insist on learning the BBC’s own precise, concrete, practical and ethical reaction, which, despite some defensive voices from elevated quarters, has not been as much as ...”

“... du Barry, similarly, Negri twice has a man blindfolded; she dresses in men’s clothes and has the king acting as a lady’s maid. In Die Bergkatze, when she wants to gain the hero’s attention, she chucks a snowball at him. She’s always running, darting around the possibly parodic Expressionist-style sets, racing up and down the staircases. Matching her ...”

“... the first black member of the Ohio state legislature – to describe the atrocities committed by King Leopold’s regime in Congo Free State, and it was this charge that made Nuremberg the prototype for what has come to be known as victims’ justice. Nonetheless, conspiracy to wage war and its actual waging (1 and 2) were defined as the principal crimes on ...”

“... As anyone who has directed a remake of King Kong knows, revisiting classics is a perilous business. However much you claim to stand on the shoulders of the mighty beast, you still risk ending up, like Fay Wray, squeezed in its paw. A.M. Gibbs spends most of the introduction to Bernard Shaw: A Life justifying his decision to return to a very well-ploughed furrow ...”

“... convention that can be irritating when it is clear that a perfectly ordinary individual, not a king or even a newspaper, is speaking. American reviewers had a good model in Edmund Wilson’s unaffected prose. The tone of English criticism varied from Ezra Pound’s egotistical shouting to the confident elegance of the Sunday paper reviewers, and, in ...”

“... for the ends of power. He caused blackmail letters to be sent from the FBI to Dr Martin Luther King, urging him to commit suicide. Historians and journalists have never quite known what to do about these sorts of disclosure. They have never known whether to treat such episodes as normal or exceptional. It is, for example, perfectly true to say that the ...”