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“... of them all. It is a sign of the passing of time that on the dustjacket of this book the name of Ludovic Kennedy is five times bigger than Lindbergh’s. Half a century ago, nobody’s name was bigger than Lindy’s. Lindbergh was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, the son of a Congressman; his parents parted when he was 14. He left school at 16, learned ...”

“... The title of this book comes from a television critic’s shrewd observation: ‘Whenever I see Mr Ludovic Kennedy in a television studio, he gives me the impression that he has been good enough to drop by to see if he can lend a hand while on the way to the club.’ A comparable judgment, also quoted in the book, appeared in the Times after Mr Kennedy had interviewed a nervous Cardinal Hume: ‘By his assurance, condescension, ease of posture and conversational initiative, Mr Kennedy might just as well have been a bishop testing a candidate for ordination ...”

“... She needs to be watched: she may be a weasel in talcum powder. One person who saw it coming was Ludovic Kennedy who, hearing Hutton named to head the inquiry, correctly predicted the outcome. I looked up the judge, then Sir Brian Hutton, in Kennedy’s Thirty-Six Murders, where he pinpoints one of Hutton’s ...”

“... of this biography, and brought such champions of Wheldon’s reputation as Sir Denis Forman, Ludovic Kennedy and Melvyn Bragg trumpeting into the field. In common with other young men of his generation (he was born in 1916), Wheldon was slow to come to terms with his sexual drive. Sent to stay with a Westphalian family and learn German during the ...”

“... between six and eight million people … The current muster has Robin Day, tenacious as a badger; Ludovic Kennedy, whose line is artistic, faintly raffish melancholy; James Mossman, the ardent Galahad who will never take for granted that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC ...”

“... had gone very wrong indeed, though what it was remained at first curiously elusive. It was Ludovic Kennedy, in The Trial of Stephen Ward (Gollancz, 1964), who first put his finger on it. With blinding insight, he reminded us that, in a country that values its liberties, the function of the police is to investigate known crimes, and to discover the ...”

“... set aside for so-called ‘distinguished observers’. I sat there day after day in the company of Ludovic Kennedy, the doyen of miscarriages of justice cases; Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, the archbishop of Armagh; and a revolving cast of politicians and clergymen from both sides of the Irish Sea. At one point even the archbishop of New York was ...”

“... wall is well-known to all true crime connoisseurs, who have watched the excellent 1971 film, read Ludovic Kennedy’s 1961 book on which it was based and endured the unremittingly miserable 2016 BBC three-parter Rillington Place. It’s a story that will not settle, because we will never know the full truth of what happened inside that house during its ...”

“... said the chairman of the school’s finance committee, ‘but of course there was nothing.’ Ludovic Kennedy, whose daughter went to Fettes in the Trench years, has revealed that his floggings grew in intensity as the years went on. Often, in desperation, Trench picked out wholly innocent boys for beating. He became ill and resorted increasingly to ...”

“... 1949. Those with false recollections of listening to it nine years before included the broadcaster Ludovic Kennedy (‘When we heard it, we knew in an instant that everything would be all right’) and a chairman of the BBC, Marmaduke Hussey. The day after Churchill didn’t make his speech on the radio, J.B. Priestley did make one. On 5 June, the Home ...”

“... Only reporters who had attended the trial, and members of the judiciary, knew the extent of it. Ludovic Kennedy’s book The Trial of Stephen Ward came out the following year and expressed their indignation. But there was a lot that Kennedy and others didn’t know. Phillip Knightley, who wrote an excellent book ...”