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“... be where they are, or not working at all, but with nowhere else to go. Thus far, the thesis in Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s book is right. Anyone who’s visited a Russian government office will have seen one of those gigantic, boastful maps of the country, covering an entire wall. It is only after a while that you realise how misleading the maps ...”

“... May as a “captive” or “prisoner”’ of her former joint chiefs of staff, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Boris Johnson, letting off steam after a tough session at Number Ten with the chiefs of staff, alluded to Hill’s crusading work against people trafficking: ‘That’s modern slavery, right there.’ Under ...”

“... or less run by May and her two main advisers: Timothy, the supposedly visionary strategist, and Fiona Hill, who was more street-smart and politically savvy.Everything fell apart on election night, when Hill and Timothy became scapegoats for the loss of the slim majority May inherited from David Cameron. But the real ...”

“... ensued cost Gove his job as education secretary and May the services of her most trusted adviser, Fiona Hill. But their dispute also had its origins in an incident a year earlier, when Gove had sounded off at a cabinet away day about a Home Office policy that he had come to see as hopelessly inadequate, the so-called Gang Task Force. This was something ...”

“... the blame for the disaster. There is plenty to go around. May’s aides Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill have already been dispatched. Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ campaign guru, has let it be known he had his doubts from the start, thinking it far too risky at a time of global political instability. He could have added that no government should ever ...”

“... went on to become full-blown dissidents with arrests and jail terms to show for it. A new book by Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy attempts to draw a psychological portrait of Putin and finds at least six personas in him, from the ‘history man’ to the ‘free marketeer’ (I would add several more to their list).* The condition has made for a generation ...”

“... glow of John Betjeman’s ardour. This is just the sort of ‘facile and patronising view’ that Fiona MacCarthy, herself one of those who queued up to curtsey in 1958, is determined to counter. Nearly fifty years on, having spent the intervening decades hoping that nobody would find out about her shamefully smart past, she has decided to tell all and to ...”

“... as well as analyses by academics and think-tankers: Alena Ledeneva’s Can Russia Modernise?, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy’s Mr Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (2013) and Richard Sakwa’s Putin Redux (2014). New Year’s Eve 1999 – when Yeltsin appeared on Russian TV screens to announce his resignation as president in favour of Putin – is ...”

“... of this has harmed the Courtauld because, as the dealer Philip Mould revealed to an astonished Fiona Bruce in Fake or Fortune, van Meegerens fetch more these days than Baburens. Van Meegeren’s career vividly exemplifies the corkscrew character of the forger-as-artist. He was put on trial after the war for collaboration, having sold a Vermeer to Hermann ...”

“... The folks that live on the hill? It’s not exactly what you’d expect of a Kingsley Amis title, but in another two years the old devil will be 70 and perhaps he is beginning to mellow. John McDermott remarks in his appealing study of Amis’s novels that the hero-as-shit, at large in a world of mutual animosity and obsessive self-interest, is one of their most characteristic figures ...”

“... were at the time more or less silent witnesses. Among those Thompson should not have ignored are Fiona MacCarthy’s The Last Curtsey (2006), a witty account of coming out at a time when debs were turning into dolly birds, and Elisabeth Luard’s My Life as a Wife (2008). Luard’s book casts a sharp sidelight on the scene Thompson needs to evoke. Her ...”

“... are donnishly based on literary jokes like these, and probably the best in the book is a Geoffrey Hill parody which pictures Hill playing tennis against his devoted admirer Martin Dodsworth: Who crouches at the net, his mouth compressed Severely to a little Gothic slit? On the whole, though, the book falls well short of ...”

“... on a chosen bit of coast brings her closer to Frank Auerbach, who has concentrated on Primrose Hill, than to painters who made brush marks more like her own. When you think about what kind of artist she was, putting her child-invaded studio and Lucian Freud’s naked-friend-and-acquaintance-laden chairs and couches side by side suggests a common attitude ...”

“... of obesity, the topic has, as it were, ballooned. Forth’s book joins, among others, David and Fiona Haslam’s Fat, Gluttony and Sloth: Obesity in Literature, Art and Medicine (2009), Sander Gilman’s Obesity: The Biography (2010) and Calories and Corsets: A History of Dieting over 2000 Years by Louise Foxcroft (2011). All of these are concerned in ...”

“... However, good intentions are still intentions: This is the slope of loneliness. This is the hill of silence ... A stony patience. This is, in fact, the height of abstraction. Montague’s diction betrays him here, as in the awkward phrase ‘gasps of, glimpses of miracle’. His over-insistent participles and adjectives cannot disguise a deep ...”