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“... anonymous Dutch master which pushes Freddie Montgomery over the edge into homicide. Like Banville, Howard Norman and Katharine Weber write about stealing Dutch paintings, and they share a similar attitude to them. For them, Dutch art represents modesty of subject-matter, and precision – ‘the details’ is a phrase of some importance in both ...”

“... or neglected. There are ghosts and ghosts. Some of them may be more up-to-date than we are. Howard Norman’s Canadian version of pastoral, first published in America in 1987, allows us a sidelong glance at these questions. It, too, has ghosts and concerns the past, but although coolly and crisply written, it is more elegiac than either of the ...”

“... his old denial that he had ever had a homosexual affair with a young groom and male model called Norman Scott, the man he was eventually to be accused of wanting to have murdered; yet he throws no other light at all on their acknowledged acquaintanceship – immortalised for the middle-aged by that famous phrase in a letter Thorpe once sent to Scott ...”

“... the crystal ball. We have seen the future. In his lecture to the Royal Institution on 4 April, Howard Stringer, President of the CBS network in the United States, cautioned ‘against promiscuous uses of the word “freedom”. It is a word that, second only to “patriotism”, offers rich opportunities for flim-flam ... freedom is most available to those ...”

“... an Evening Standard contributor, who had taken me to the lunch, had just started going out with Norman Mailer.) But what I now think was probably genuine was the acknowledgment on the proprietor’s part that Wintour enjoyed ‘favoured nation status’ among Beaverbrook editors. Within certain limits – of which, no doubt, support for capital punishment ...”

“... times, De Gaulle replied: ‘The fact that the Americans speak English.’ In Power and Glory R.T. Howard argues that for the French national power and influence are intimately bound up not just with ‘soft power’ but with the influence of one’s culture and language specifically. This was a cause for concern when Britain was applying to join the ...”

“... in 1066, conveniently ominous for the tapestry’s mendacious propaganda on behalf of the Norman Conquest. 1986 sees another remarkable periodic manifestation: this year is the 900th anniversary of Domesday Book, and centennial celebrations are in progress. Domesday Book consists of two volumes compiled in 1086: a parchment folio, Great Domesday ...”

“... Howard Walter Florey was a great man and nomistake. He devoted the more important partof his professional life to a single wholly admirable purpose which he pursued until he achieved it, showing, in spite of many setbacks and rebuffs, the magnanimity that is the minimal entry qualification for being considered ‘great ...”

“... hammocks signing up biographies of high-profile authors such as Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer (three thus far, along with a memoir by one of his former wives, with other exes waiting in the wings to take their whacks). The irony is that publishers seem more eager to bring out books about golden-oldie authors than books by them, gossip about ...”

“... that the KA is a pub (I did know that), then you’re lost. ‘The Dean’ (of Peterhouse, Edward Norman) and ‘the Chancellor’ (of Oxford, Harold Macmillan) are not identified. How many readers will translate ‘My Successor … is not in much favour with your successor … owing to his lack of assiduity in his attendance beneath the portrait of Queen ...”

“... The most timely confirmation of Wolfe’s savage assertions in The Bonfire of the Vanities is the Howard Beach case, the sentences in which are just now being given out. On 19 December 1986, a car with three young black men in it broke down near Howard Beach, in the borough of Queens. The area is solidly white, and the ...”

“... some of his rivals. Charles Brandon was part of a coterie of special favourites, with Edward Howard, Thomas Knyvett and Henry Guildford. In 1512, the young king went to war with France. Charles was given command of troops for a sea attack on Brittany, to be led by Edward Howard. With Thomas Knyvett on board, the Regent ...”

“... when uttered by Conservatives who had risen from the lower middle class, like Thatcher herself or Norman Tebbit, but is impossible to swallow from Cameron and other graduates of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, who carry out acts of vandalism dressed in bow tie and tails. Exposure to the real lives of typical Britons would probably blur the concept of ...”

“... of his misdeeds would be almost unthinkable, had it not been for Ronnie Barker and his alter ego Norman Stanley Fletcher. Porridge made even prison appear as warm and cosy as the front sitting-room. Prison has proved almost as attractive to the courts. Great Britain continues to imprison more of its population, and for longer periods of time, than almost any ...”

“... patrician composure suggestive of Burt Lancaster playing Lampedusa’s Leopard. Neither Vidal nor Howard Auster, his long-standing companion, swam in the pool, which was even more impressively blue than the sea at the foot of the cliff. Sunshine, cypresses, cicadas, scented air, the physical drama: all the sense-heightening Mediterranean stuff. Kurt ...”