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“... a dance record – a techno dance record – and solo composition by Richard ‘Moby’ Hall, created on his computer at home in New York. During its almost lyric-less six minutes and 30 seconds of fast beats, atonal bleeps and melodic keyboard lines, you hear ‘go’ shouted 37 times, ‘yeah’ 23 times, and ‘hold tight’ (I think) seven ...”

“... would have wanted Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the leads. But Ford insisted on Claire Trevor and John Wayne (who wasn’t a star until this movie made him one). Dietrich and Cooper would have turned Dallas and Ringo into the natural aristocrats that Ford didn’t want; Trevor and the young Wayne assume no ...”

“... capitals of polygonal rose-coloured marble pillars, beautiful late gothic vaults closed over the Hall of the Knights. Has he really remembered those diapers, those cusped ogees – he doesn’t say he had a camera and a hundred rolls of film – or has he conjured the details on the spur of the fewer images he has indeed remembered? In other respects, Leigh ...”

“... While the writers themselves never know the winner’s identity in advance, various people in the hall do, including the TV technicians. You could ask them directly, of course (or bribe the judges’ chauffeur, who is always a good source): but you will find out surely enough whether you have landed the big pot by following the movements of the hand-held ...”

“... a boy of 13, a trifle young even for the man-eating Diana. The cast were brilliant – the young Trevor Howard, Rex Harrison, the green-eyed Kay Hammond, who was to be such a success in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit – and this, together with all the jollity and schoolboy humour and comic French, made the piece a tremendous success. The new King George VI ...”

“... cantata has a similar power. No one could sit, as I did earlier this year, in the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus under Richard Hickox and not be shattered into submission. Belshazzar’s Feast takes Elgarian oratorio by its neck and flings it into the 20th century. But it is dramatically ...”

“... County, King’s County, Kingstown are still imperially there; it’s like a moment in a William Trevor story. I look at a framed text over the fireplace: Christians should endeavour, as the Apostle Paul commands them, to live peaceably with all men (Romans 12, v. 18) even with those of a different religious persuasion. Issued November, 1863 Nice touch ...”

“... of the working classes in the second half of the 20th century: ‘the telly, the car, the bingo hall … eating fish and chips in Spain’. The laughter of the Cheltenham audience is tinged with shock that he should be quite so sneering. In the second lecture, discussing the unfortunate consequences of Eliot’s ‘Francophilia’ and referring to his essay ...”

“... household consume? The question is in all probability irrelevant, except that in such a hall of mirrors no questions are irrelevant. Another line in Romanoff and Juliet has a bearing on this review. Beulah, the wife of the American Ambassador to Concordia, says: ‘Isn’t that interesting! I just adore history. It’s so old.’ To which her ...”

“... hundreds of thousands were built, had a bourgeois look. Coventry Cathedral and the Royal Festival Hall were modern architecture on a human scale. Though a high proportion of Londoners were being rehoused in flats, the LCC forbade the construction of blocks more than six storeys high. So there wasn’t a visible ‘social revolution’, or an invisible ...”

“... mocks, to have a vestibule rather than a lobby (though I don’t know what’s wrong with ‘hall’). Erdal’s take on Attallah’s high-stepping girls is cold-eyed and precise. They spoke, she says, in italics. They used words and phrases like grotty, golly, frightful pong, a total darling, complete noodle, and were always absolutely livid rather than ...”

“... as it was disdainful of the lower orders. Yet, nearly a year before Look Back in Anger, Peter Hall directed another play with one set and five characters, who perform music-hall turns, make long speeches and take off their trousers; in which nothing much happens, key elements of the first half are echoed in the ...”

“... office, I look up at a gable-end: Lest We Forget This plaque is dedicated to the memory of Lt Col Trevor King died July 1994 Major W. (Frenchie) Marchant These men were killed near this spot by the enemies of Ulster. No Sacrifice is too great for one’s country. This looks like an unyielding Loyalist memorial, but the sense now is of working-class ...”

“... voice – once richly modulated, now trembly. In 1971 he agreed to act in The Old Boys by William Trevor at the Mermaid; the crew fitted him with an invisible prompter attached to an earpiece. At the first public performance the prompter malfunctioned, sending out a loud hissing, leaving both Redgrave and the audience in a state of high anxiety. The next day ...”

“... he encountered keen criticism from academic historians, spearheaded by Pieter Geyl and Hugh Trevor-Roper, which marginalised his major project in the eyes of his own profession. As his new biographer, William McNeill, candidly declares, ‘a principal purpose of this book is to try to establish a better balance between the popular adulation on the one ...”