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“... fictions of Len Deighton and John Le Carré. Watching the shadow-play on the walls of the Cold War cave, and seeing the literal interpenetration of opposites as Karla penetrated ‘us’, and ‘we’ reciprocated, one could make the induction that the spy game was a thing in itself, and that those who took part in it, and those who paid them to do so, had ...”

“... cultural facts. Seeley in 1883 talks about England ‘expanding’ to reach its Victorian stature; Anthony Low, in 1983, of England ‘contracting’, in the second Elizabethan age, to become again a minor power on the flank of Europe. Popular sentiment and historical scholarship cling to this leavened loaf theory of a Celtic-Roman-German-Norse-Norman people ...”

“... props in the Ken Tynan legend assembly-kit, along with the Mickey Mouse watch and effete-aesthete Anthony Blanche outfits he wore at Oxford, and, later, the poolstick collection of headmaster’s canes he kept handy to beat women’s bottoms. The cigarettes eventually killed him, but it is only with one in his hand that he looks fully activated, in ...”

“... spring afternoon and they have dressed for it in country formal outfits: stout boots, long, brown chequerboard coats with too many buttons, furry headwarmers that flap down over their ears. They look worried – like posh herdsmen who have lost their reindeer. At Shoreditch Church, they dress to the left and march west under the railway bridge. It’s ...”