Search Results

“... As the subtitle indicates, as the author tells us on the first page, and as he reminds us in the last chapter, ‘a simple question’ states the theme and explains the origin of Jeremy Paxman’s book: Who runs Britain? There are fitful efforts to generate a sense of mystery about the answer. Thus at the outset ‘the only serious answer’ is mooted in terms which invite suspicion that we might be in for a counter-intuitive disclosure later: ‘Exaggerated though her influence might be, the hand of Britain’s first female prime minister was seen behind everything from the management of industry to the appointment of professors ...”

“... at 10.20 p.m., Queen Mary would breathe her last, a 43-year-old Jamaican jazz musician called Beresford Wallace Brown, who had arrived in England in 1950 and now worked in a dairy in Shepherd’s Bush, was trying to put up a shelf on which to perch his radio while redecorating the ground-floor kitchen of 10 Rillington Place, where he was an upstairs ...”

“... up a host of names, some of them forgotten: Douglas Goldring, Leslie Welsh, Edward Shanks, J.D. Beresford, Ethel Carnie, Patrick Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of resistance, even vision’. The ...”

“... of Hever grounds so effectively that it was supposed his middle name was Walled-Off. There was Sir Philip Sassoon, the homosexual politician who added a bachelors’ wing to Port Lympne around a Moorish courtyard which Honor Channon likened to a Moorish brothel. And there was Lord Charles Beresford, on a country-house ...”