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“... intellectuals, alien Jews and international pederasts who call themselves the Labour Party,’ Alan Bennett had Richard Hannay, Buchan’s most famous hero, muse in Forty Years On (1968). Another West End send-up of The Thirty-Nine Steps finished a nine-year run in September 2015, a century after the final instalment of Buchan’s best-known novel appeared ...”

“... American palaeontologist Joseph Leidy. Then there are ‘men who knew too much’ (Robert Hooke, Alan Turing, G.K. Chesterton and, predictably, Alfred Hitchcock) and those whose knowledge ‘changed everything’ (Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell). Everything-knowers are admired, though with qualifications: the ‘know-it-all’ is an ...”

“... though one of her legs was two and a half inches shorter than the other. In the 1930s, the young Alan Turing went skinny-dipping off the rocks, photographed by an enthusiastic housemaster.Sark’s appeal remains its rugged coastal scenery, sunshine, peacefulness, birds, butterflies, dolphins and absence of carbon monoxide. Artists have come for 150 ...”

“... parody of the industrial worker, as represented by Albert Finney in Karel Reisz’s film of Alan Sillitoe’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The most exciting young actor of his generation tracked across the Nottingham cobbles, as Cameron was tracked through Notting Hill, by an unseen camera car. The liberation of ...”

“... minister when in office. John McGregor (afterwards Lord McGregor) has rejoined merchant bankers Hill Samuel since his departure from the Transport Department, where he was Secretary of State. Hill Samuel has advised the Government in many privatisations, including that of British Airways. During Mr McGregor’s tenure at ...”

“... age isn’t remembered as such, though at the time vertiginous constructions such as the Gravelly Hill interchange (‘Spaghetti Junction’) and the multi-level futuristic cityscape of Smallbrook Queensway were celebrated as equivalents to the Los Angeles freeway system. But he isn’t entirely correct to say that nobody is nostalgic for the architecture of ...”

“... with its own version of English continuity. As Cairns Craig has argued in Cencrastus, Christopher Hill and E.P. Thompson see class struggle as fundamental to English history, but conceive that history to be ‘shaped as an autonomous inner trajectory defined by the conflicts and the accommodations between classes which do not need to be understood except in ...”

“... extended to all fighters, the incentives, which depend on reciprocity, break down. Or, as General Hill, responsible for Guantánamo as commander of the US Southern Command, laconically put it: ‘They behead us.’ In general, one might object that abandoning reciprocity gives the other side no reason not to get its retaliation in first. But al-Qaida had ...”

“... a more honest one). This ethos was deliberately in stark contrast to that of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, a man who told a Senate committee in 1987: ‘If I seem unduly clear to you, you must have misunderstood what I said.’ Bond traders used to try and work out what Greenspan was planning by studying the size of his briefcase as he arrived for ...”

“... of Landseer’s works makes a similar point, though with less subtlety. Royal Sports on Hill and Loch, his largest royal work, was twenty years in the making, but thought so dreadful that Victoria’s grandson George V had it destroyed (it lives on in various copies and mezzotints). She had laid out her vision for the picture in her journal: ‘the ...”

“... Tony Fretton, Georgie Wolton (an exceptionally rare woman in this group), the partnership of Alan Colquhoun and John Miller. In the 1970s and 1980s most of these could be found designing mews houses and studios in Camden, Hampstead and Islington, all of course included here. All were a cut above the usual intellectual level of 1980s ...”

“... notably the trials of Lord Montagu, Bill Field (a promising Labour MP) and, most tragically, Alan Turing, the progenitor of modern computing, whose arrest in 1952 precipitated ‘a slow, sad descent into grief and madness’ ending in suicide. Once in jail, homosexuals were often given electric shock treatment and oestrogen to cure them of their ...”

“... his sidekick Ted Maltby as a ‘farting exhibitionist’ resembling ‘those baboons on Monkey Hill, exhibiting to all in turn their great iridescent blue bottoms’. Not surprisingly, such men came to hate him. One of them even tried to frame him as a traitor who was passing the Ultra secret to Nazi agents in Ireland – a charge that could have landed ...”

“... lonely women are brought to ruin by a manipulative man. By then, towns like Hassocks and Burgess Hill have taken on an almost occult significance, as have alcohol, prostitution, the theatre, cheap accommodation, Fascism, golf, motor vehicles, moustaches, and the use of out-of-date slang. Most readers’ first entry into this claustrophobic world is by way of ...”

“... me awake, and no one was sorry;The sun shone on sails, eyes, pebbles, anything,And the high green hill sits always by the sea.‘No one was sorry’ admits to a world in which people might be, but doesn’t concede to it. With its transvaluation of everything via that ‘anything’, and its blissed-out drift from recollected past into incantatory ...”