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“... controls will have to travel far outside the normal political boundaries. They could start with Nigel Harris’s timely book. In a panoramic survey of worldwide migration over the last fifty years, Harris asks the questions which always arise wherever the subject comes up. If there are no statutory controls, will a ...”

“... from Derry with amazing literary gifts and an insight into what was coming in the Six Counties. Nigel Harris, who knew about the Third World and could write about it without sentimentality. Peter Sedgwick, the conscience of us all and the satirist of the ideologues. Plus a network of self-taught trade unionists who could talk about Spain, about the ...”

“... I used occasionally to lecture to doctors at the Institute of Orthopaedics on giving expert evidence. With a hierarchical propriety that would have done the legal profession credit, the audience would arrange itself in order of seniority, consultants in the front row, registrars behind and so on. The occasion I enjoyed most was when I stayed to listen to the next lecture, ‘On Alleged Medical Negligence’, delivered by George Bonney, a laconic orthopaedic surgeon with long experience on the governing body of the Medical Defence Union ...”

“... of Princess Elizabeth) who came to the islands in 1946 as guests of Nicolson’s father, Nigel (son of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West). They lasted a night. Wakened by noisy rats, they screamed. Nigel would have to row them back out to a fishing boat in the morning. But he had forgotten to tie up his ...”

“... you will not need to be reminded of the significance of the date at the head of the narrative in Nigel Williams’s Star Turn: 13 February 1945. The narrator of Williams’s third novel is an ex-journalist, now a Ministry of Information man and amateur cynic (he does not believe the early reports of the death-camps). His job is to sell the bombing of Dresden ...”

“... to herself as ‘head of state’ and talking of ‘I, as a government’. Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson may have fulminated against her, in the course of reviewing this book, but they helped launch the good ship Thatcher and sailed in her fatly for many a year, long sustaining and defending her against those who objected from the outset to government ...”

“... Eye was celebrated for hoaxing politicians and celebrities: several hapless Tories, plus Rolf Harris and Noel Edmonds, filmed impassioned warnings against a fictitious drug called ‘cake’ which affected, Edmonds said, ‘the part of the brain called Shatner’s Bassoon’. But the show also hit serious points about hypocrisy, prurience and selective ...”

“... buggers for a sequinned frock. The most brazen hijack of Wilde’s life is performed by Frank Harris’s biography, a generous, boastful book whose shameless exaggerations have the uncanny ring of authenticity. (True to the disingenuous spirit of the memoir, Robinson’s welcome reprint has ‘Now a major film starring Stephen Fry’ splashed across its ...”

“... or merely a proofreader’s oversight? The second is Anthony Blunt’s account of Tomas Harris, whom he describes as ‘artist, art dealer and intelligence officer’. What wistful, envious or remorseful sense of irony prompted Blunt to remark that Harris perpetrated ‘the most successful doublecross operation of ...”

“... risk by consulting their visitor’s book, then – well, let’s take a look: Lenny Henry, Rolf Harris, Dave Gilmour, Nigel Kennedy, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton, Lol Creme, Gary Brooker, Andy Fairweather Low … I can’t be the only Kate fan who puts their fingers in their ears when Rolf ...”

“... Again and again, Dyer convicts himself out of his own mouth. As his friend Major General Nigel Woodyatt later told him, ‘he was bound to get the worst of it; not so much for what he had done, but for what he had said.’ As Nigel Collett declares in The Butcher of Amritsar (2005), his magisterial Life of ...”

“... here and Michael Williams, Dame Wendy, Lindsay A., Ron Pickup and Anna Massey, Keith Baxter, Percy Harris, who’s 90 herself, and Ralph Richardson’s widow, Mu. I am happily seated between Jocelyn Herbert and Merula Guinness, with both of whom one can be happily silly. ‘You see,’ says Jocelyn. ‘I look down this table at all these distinguished people ...”

“... Thanet,​ where Nigel Farage will try to win a Westminster seat at the next election, lies nicely along the axis of his commute between his home in South London and his office at the European Parliament in Brussels. If Kent, cartographically speaking, is England’s right foot, the Isle of Thanet is its big toe, pointing east into the sea towards Belgium ...”

“... of the Brexit movement. Puffing a book entitled Enoch Was Right by one of his Ukip lieutenants, Nigel Farage trumpeted, ‘Enoch never goes away.’ Biographies​ of Powell, many written by ardent fans, now run into double figures, the longest and most enjoyable, by Simon Heffer, standing at nearly a thousand pages. This latest study, by the Belfast ...”

“... an appointment cutting across the role of Richard Hall, the paper’s Africa Correspondent. Nigel Hawkes, then Foreign News Editor, resigned that post in protest. The independent directors did not feel themselves called upon to adjudicate in that dispute since it was the editor’s own decision finally to hire Mutatu for a trial period, even though the ...”