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“... bus pass which he scrutinises as grimly as an Albanian border guard, even checking the likeness. Andrew Wilson sails through unchallenged.I walk back through the streets of Oxford and as always I have a sense of being shut out and that there is something going on here that I’m not a part of; not that I was a part of it even when I was a part of it.16 ...”

“... the pursuit of pleasure, one form of which was the cinema. Gaumont, Odeon, Regal: their names, Ian Jack wrote, ‘seemed independent of any history. They may have been intended to suggest luxury, romance, good birth and breeding.’ Cinemas and the arterial road factories of Hoover, Coty, Firestone were all façade, big sheds with a decorative face to the ...”

“... and on Instagram and Facebook, too. ‘I love England,’ she wrote in one post, next to a Union Jack, and ‘Live in London’, beside an emoji of a small house and a very green tree. She liked to imagine that one day she would live in a house like that with her husband, Hassan, and their two daughters. Hassan used to work at the mosque. Later on, when he ...”

“... the group’s best tunes, only to be pushed out for being a Beatles-loving middle-class namby.) Andrew Loog Oldham, who managed the Rolling Stones, was the crucial precursor in grasping that bad publicity was useful – something to be actively sought, even fabricated. But he hadn’t featured so prominently in the coverage of his clients as McLaren ...”

“... paedophile Satanist ring and save the children. In QAnon, Trump is portrayed as a cross between Jack Ryan, the tough, smart, patriotic family man played by Harrison Ford in the movies based on the Tom Clancy novels, and the archangel Michael.There’s​ a danger that in writing about QAnon – a social phenomenon not just in the US but in Britain, Germany ...”

“... be more of this. 23 May. Ros Chatto, my agent, calls to say I have been offered a role in the BBC Andrew Davies adaptation of Fanny Hill. She reads through this raunchy script finding no mention of the part for which I’m slated until she gets to the very final scene, where Fanny meets an old and respectable gentleman (me) whom she fucks to extinction, then ...”

“... corruption. The ‘plebgate’ row of 2012 – when Downing Street protection officers accused Andrew Mitchell, the Tory chief whip, of swearing and calling them ‘plebs’ – contributed to this feeling. CCTV footage cast doubt on the officers’ account, while a man claiming to be an ordinary witness turned out to be a serving officer who wasn’t ...”

“... novel The Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed ...”

“... of its resources and surveillance time monitoring such well-known left-wing subversives as Jack Straw and Peter Mandelson, as well as CND and Vietnam War protesters. More important, from a counter-terrorist perspective, it was deeply involved in the British state’s confrontation with modern Irish Republican terrorism. Until 1992, the Met Special ...”

“... purpose (do we really need to know that Roth wrote to the co-op board on behalf of his agent, Andrew Wylie? Or that Roth’s friend Joel Conarroe read a goofy telegram at Roth’s sixtieth birthday bash purportedly from John Updike that began ‘Masel gov, you alte cocker’?), but it concretises the sense of comprehensiveness to an impressive, even ...”

“... not a chosen intimate. Aesthetic imagination was not a bond between them. Severn had what Andrew Motion has described as ‘a horrible tendency to sound both snobbish and fawning when talking about his posh connections’. For him, art was a means of social advancement and truth a thing to improve on. His artistic distinction was bogus. The merit of ...”

“... Square – a moment almost too complex to be properly grasped in a short extract. There is also Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement (1960), a marvellously subtle and original novel about the liminal sexual status of a Jamaican immigrant man, torn between a white boyfriend and an affair with an exploitative landlady.And there is Gillian ...”