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“... 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, all the talk among the boys at my primary school was of Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe. Clued-up children – in other words, those whose parents were more interested in athletics than mine – knew all about the rivalry between ‘the Tough and the Toff’, as Pat Butcher calls them in his new double-subtitled book, The Perfect ...”

“... to account for this, but the luck is worth glorying in. It embraces even the principals’ names: Coe and Ovett – as snappy as trademarks, and eminently saleable on the vowel-happy continent of Europe where the pair’s records have mostly been set. One thinks of them as a pair not on account of their resemblances, of course, but because they seem to have ...”

“... and family-values man. What a guy! William Hague meanwhile is not a great man and behind him is Sebastian Coe. Lately, however, he has employed the services of another gorgeous ex-hack, Amanda Platell, fun-loving Aussie, the femme fatale of the Mirror Group, ex-editor of the Sunday Express, and now would-be novelist. Some in the Conservative Party were ...”

“... University. Clive Woodward played rugby and studied sports science at Loughborough, and Sebastian Coe trained there under George Gandy. Woodward credits Coe and Gandy with teaching him the importance of professionalism; it was Coe who hired Woodward years later to be ...”

“... do on under.’ Nobody in the 1998 symposium attempts to echo Connolly’s louche self-indulgence (Sebastian Faulks attractively comes close, with his preferred target of £X + 52A + 2RT: ‘A’ stands for alcohol intake, ‘RT’ for return tickets to somewhere very far away). The tone nowadays is solemn when it is not spiky. With the 1946 survey you ...”