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“... about, and so indicative of a place, a time and a culture. When he was himself living in Brighton, Nigel Jones happened to meet the widow of the writer’s elder brother Bruce, who gave him access to a mass of letters the siblings had exchanged over the years. As one might expect, the atmosphere of the Hamilton household was decidedly incestuous: father a ...”

“... life by a crazed Islamist. Ten years earlier, again while conducting a surgery, the Cheltenham MP Nigel Jones was seriously injured by a sword-wielding constituent. His assistant was killed. All this was long before Brexit poisoned the well of British politics.Has it got worse? Yes, it has. Brexit has released a nasty strain of chauvinism which has ...”

“... sanitised. Christopher Hassall was asked to write the authorised biography in part because, as Nigel Jones notes in his own biography of Brooke, Hassall’s lengthy Life of Eddie Marsh had managed ‘to avoid the topic of his subject’s homosexuality’ and he could therefore be relied on to be discreet. (It’s unfair to say that Hassall doesn’t ...”

“... course there was the drinking. Bruce died in 1974. After an interval, his widow gave his papers to Nigel Jones, whose 1991 biography of Hamilton was followed two years later by a less substantial Life written by Sean French. Between them, these biographers raised their subject to his current position as the go-to guy for shabby-genteel, pub-dwelling ...”

“... the bouncy castle of celebrity without taking off their shoes? What will happen, for example, to Nigel Farndale? Farndale’s Flirtation, Seduction, Betrayal: Interviews with the Rich and Famous is to be published at the end of October (Constable, £14.99). When an advance proof copy arrived on the Short Cuts desk I eagerly pounced: at last! Everything I ...”

“... straw poll stand in his way, however. He has accused Ukip of being run by a ‘cabal’ headed by Nigel Farage, the Ukip MEP for the South-East, and says it’s time for the party to grow up and get serious. Suggesting that the chairmen were subject to ‘Mugabe-style’ intimidation from the cabal, Kilroy-Silk has demanded a poll of the party’s entire ...”

“... Yes, yes, Mr Burne-Jones,’ Benjamin Jowett is reputed to have said as he inspected the artist’s newly completed Arthurian murals in the Oxford Union, ‘but what does one do with the Grail once one has found it?’ This sounds almost as much the definitive question as the Grail was the definitive quest, but Jowett’s objection is more radically misconceived than any answer could be ...”

“... constant tease of Answered Prayers – that promised concoction which will be half Proust, half Nigel Dempster – but in the meantime a new aesthetic was getting overdue. The Preface to Music for Chameleons, reprinted from Vogue, provides it. It opens with some routine bravado – ‘Writers, at least those who take genuine risks, who are willing to bite ...”

“... classic tactical treatise of the 17th century, Go Rin No Sho (A Book of Five Rings), and replaces Nigel Short’s notorious TDF game-plan of (‘trap, dominate, fuck’) with haikus and aikido tenets (‘If pulled, enter. If pushed, turn’). Zen training to cultivate the quality of fudoshin, the ‘imperturbable mind’, is offered as the perfect blend of ...”

“... are missing a different point: and they’re bound to, because they did read it at school. Nigel Molesworth is a 1950s prep-school boy – the ‘goriller of 3B’, ‘curse of st custard’s which is the skool i am at’ – whose spelling is atrocious. His diaries, written by Geoffrey Willans (a one-time schoolmaster) and illustrated by Ronald ...”

“... who lives in Vancouver, was in London on 31 January. ‘Dreamt of a squealing, woad-smeared Nigel Farage,’ he tweeted, ‘weakly prancing naked at Stonehenge, then woke to see I’d slept, soul-delayed, through the start of Brexit Hour.’ ‘Soul delay’ is jet lag: Cayce, recently arrived in London at the beginning of Pattern Recognition, imagines ...”

“... points in the narrative, but this is not a major concern of the story – as it is for instance in Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room, published in 1943 and therefore (astonishingly) in print before the first flying bomb landed on London. None of the characters in Unexploded is bombed out of a home, which makes a passage like this one seem oddly ...”

“... and firmly related to the intention and quality of the programme in question. He defended Nigel Kneale’s Year of the Sex Olympics because it was a serious play; he wondered mildly if there were not some house taboo against the bare breasts on view in Nana. Incidentally, in a consideration of television and the way a television panjandrum exercises ...”

“... in climate change because they were freezing cold this winter and trust what Donald Trump or Nigel Farage tells them on Fox News or the BBC. I mean the people who stand to gain from the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, which will increase US dependence on fossil fuels: more fracking, more coal-mining, more pipelines. There’s nothing ...”

“... periodical articles, by no means all of which deserve his, or anybody else’s, attention. Nigel Smith, Marvell’s new editor, remarks that the serious annotation of Marvell’s works began only in 1927, with H.M. Margoliouth’s Oxford edition. That edition might never have been projected but for Eliot’s 1921 essay on the poet, itself the ...”