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“... effort much greater than would be required if you had plumped for a Pinter or an Ibsen or a David Hare. When we hear, for instance, that Aeschylus’ rival Phrynichus was particularly noted for his choreographies, or learn from Peter Wilson in Performance Culture and Athenian Democracy that the shawm (aulos) which always accompanied a performance came ...”

“... cronies, even older brandies and cigars, has in no sense limited the scope for prime ministerial wiles. Indeed, the advent of television has led those set in authority over us to ever fresh audacities in the presentation of their policies. Modern administrations, moreover, command a bureaucracy schooled in concealing what the participants in the ...”

“... the case that Walsh enjoys the services of one of the more established literary agents in London, David Higham Associates. The publicity studiously does not mention that Walsh has written other books. The implication is that Knowledge of Angels is a work like Joan Brady’s A Theory of War, which came from nowhere in 1993 to win the Whitbread Prize ...”

“... times have changed, incidentally: Hattersley bobs up all over the place in these pages, and David Steel gets a couple of footnotes, but Margaret Thatcher, Neil Kinnock, David Owen and Arthur Scargill make no appearance.) Mrs Castle was generally rated a highly effective departmental minister, and from these diaries ...”

“... is better informed about the fake soldier, ‘Sergeant Farthing’, claiming that his real name is David Jones and that he is a Welshman loosely attached to the London theatre. As for ‘Mr Bartholomew’, the actor says he believes him to be something of a philosopher, with a dissident and free-thinking bias, a certain mathematical or numerological expertise ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... to embed herself within networks of mutually supportive artists and thinkers. Her paintings of David Garrick and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, made in Rome early in her career, helped to establish her fame in Britain, where she moved in 1766. Shortly after she arrived, her portrait was painted by Joshua Reynolds, soon to be president of the Royal ...”

“... to fit her for the marriage market by teaching her the middle-class gentilities and feminine wiles she herself practised with pleasure and aplomb: Ivy refused to stoop to such trivial hypocrisies. When she was 17 her mother made her have all her teeth out: this seems an act of inexplicable brutality, but Carswell thinks it was done for reasons of ...”

“... has reconstructed is only a ‘family romance’, an operetta played out on her own toy stage. And David Lodge’s heroine complains that she is ‘getting dragged into a classic realist text, full of causality and morality. How can I get out of it?’ Trust the contemporary novelist for that, we might think – though, for Lodge’s characters, it’s a close ...”

“... favourite from the start and duly emerged as the winner. But he did not win by a short head from David Lloyd George. You have to scour the list to find him in 79th place, listed as ‘English, born Manchester (1858-1928)’. The part about Manchester is correct: Lloyd George’s father – who was not the only Welsh schoolteacher to move there – died there ...”

“... push the court into the public eye than abortion. In Britain abortion was legalised as a result of David Steel’s Abortion Bill of 1967, but in the US abortion rights have never had democratic legitimacy of this kind, resting instead on the 7-2 decision reached by nine male judges in Roe v. Wade (1973). The justices managed to establish abortion rights in the ...”

“... Emily Lytton’s first experiences with men had not been propitious. Aged 18, she fell for the wiles of the ‘53-year-old married philanderer’ Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, until her obsession with him was replaced by friendship with his odd daughter Judith. Hardly recovered, she met Gerald Duckworth, Virginia Woolf’s nemesis, but it was for marriage to ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... in a delicate copperplate hand, ‘The daughter of Admiral Walker’, followed by a signature: ‘David Wilkie f-t 1840’. Near her there used to hang another portrait, of a fantastical fellow in a high tarbush with a long, dangling plume, his chest puffed out in his dress uniform, with prominent epaulettes, medals at his throat and a long scimitar cradled ...”

“... We were to discuss: (1) the value of the peace treaty between Egypt and Israel (this was Camp David time), (2) peace between Israel and the Arab world generally, and (3) the rather more fundamental question of future coexistence between Israel and the surrounding Arab world. None of the Arabs seemed happy with this. I felt it leapfrogged over the matter ...”