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“... and most films noirs – and the soundtrack is full of the laid-back sounds of the Fifties, Chet Baker, Dean Martin, Johnny Mercer. When Kay Starr’s brassy voice sings ‘Wheel of Fortune’ you return not to the historical time of the song, but to the happy simplicity of the world you imagined when you listened to the song. The clothes and hair-dos have a ...”

“... has the advantage of speaking in the soundbites beloved by American television interviewers. As Michael Sheridan wrote in the Independ ent on 2 November. the Israelis possessed the best organised, most efficient, least flustered, public relations team at the conference, with Mr Netanyahu, its intellectual bruiser, rushing before the CNN cameras every other ...”

“... the Memorial, became ‘the most important figure in Chesterton’s life’, according to David Baker in Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism. The two met when Chesterton went to interview Flower, ‘whose reign over Stratford-upon-Avon came as near absolutism as made no odds’. Flower was impressed by Chesterton’s refusal to use ...”

“... regular Romeo’. But nobody has ever been called ‘a peeping Poirot’. Why is this? Why is Baker Street as universally associated with Conan Doyle’s hero as is Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, or Greyfriars School with Billy Bunter? These are hard questions, and must be put aside in favour of the simple observation that in the bookshops, as the ...”

“... moves’, a problem for shortlisted novelists leading sedentary lives, but not for the impressive Michael Collins – author of The Keepers of Truth and a keen runner. As well as completing his novel, Collins has managed to finish a marathon. A jog through the streets of London dressed up in rhino costume wasn’t quite challenging enough for him, however: he ...”

“... rides through Ealing, Leeds and Southampton, and in 1910, A Trip on the Metropolitan Railway from Baker St to Uxbridge and Aylesbury. Starling’s art has frequently involved the reconstruction or repurposing of ramshackle machines. In 2005 he won the Turner Prize with Shedboatshed, rebuilding a tumbledown hut from the banks of the Rhine as a small ...”

“... helicopter company, discerning, as he does so, a campaign to discredit her Secretary for Defence, Michael Heseltine, who subsequently resigned. He claims, moreover, that she again misled the Commons over the American use of British bases to bomb Libya, and he sees her influence behind the police raids on BBC premises in Glasgow in the wake of the uproar over ...”

“... gangs as once I watched the criminal world of London.’ These few lines supply the background to Michael Chabon’s novella, which begins thirty years later on the South Downs. The main character is an ‘old man’, once a famous detective, now devoted to his bees. He remains unnamed throughout, but given that he wears an Inverness cape and hunting cap, and ...”

“... but rigorous’ weave of it. A Spanish sound engineer accompanies the jazz musician Chet Baker to Florence for a concert, forgets the rest of his life, and ends up staying there for months himself, alone; the young Muñoz Molina was fascinated and envious. The concept of a ‘winter in Florence’ was an early version of the subsequent Winter in ...”

“... of news pages and bad for advertisers, yet he would work only for the Magazine and its Art Editor, Michael Rand. Wyndham believed, on the contrary, that people liked reading about diverting, strange, glamorous subjects – and that glamour should not be taken seriously. He was also writing pieces in his own highly original style – pieces that were often ...”

“... George Michael​ died at the age of 53 on Christmas Day 2016; despite his success, it was hard not to think of what might have been. He was born Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou on 25 June 1963 in East Finchley, London, to Jack Panos – a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison ...”

“... it with the butt of a rifle, but it only squeaked, and continued to roam over our camping space. Baker solved the problem by firing at it with the twelve bore. That was the last we saw of it. There is a sense in which the freshness and unself-consciousness of this episode is too strong for the larger context. As the novel proceeds, one can come to regret ...”

“... to use nuclear weapons in response to the use of chemical or biological weapons. In 1991, James Baker, then Secretary of State, privately warned Saddam that any recourse to chemical or biological weapons would result in a tactical nuclear response. Today, the Bush Administration has shown no compunction about making the same threat publicly. The National ...”

“... the middle classes. Harrison seems to be blaming his father and mother for being who they are (a baker and his houseproud wife), and himself for leaving home. ‘Your bed’s got two wrong sides,’ he says to his father in a poem. ‘Your life’s all grouse.’ He himself now knows all kinds of languages but has also lost one language for good: ‘the ...”

“... it first, and most convincingly. Exactly four years ago, when the aggregate of polling data gave Michael Dukakis a 17 point lead, Professor Roy Fair of Yale came up with a political/electoral ‘model’ that predicted a Bush victory with 52.2 per cent of the votes cast. In the event, Bush look 53.8 per cent, which was enough for an Electoral College ...”