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“... allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and 1980 were more prolific than VSP. Gore Vidal, always a master of understated hyperbole, praised Pritchett’s criticism by saying ‘it ...”

“... matching knitted belt. Worn by Marilyn Monroe in 1962 and featured in a series of photographs by George Barris taken on the beach in Santa Monica, California. Estimate: $30,000-50,000.’ In the corner of the window there stood a halter-neck dress from the movie Let’s Make Love. I thought of Marilyn and Yves Mont-and posing for the cameras with their ...”

“... it had been even worse: fifty for every German). Kappler – played by Richard Burton in George P. Cosmatos’s film Massacre in Rome (1973) – had to come up with names very quickly: the killings were to be carried out within 24 hours of the attack. In the film we see Burton at a desk, adding the names of political prisoners, men already condemned ...”

“... after them.’ These and other details make it tempting to identify ‘Vladimir Epstien’ with George Gershwin, and the ‘Jazz History’ with ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, performed at Carnegie Hall in 1924. By cutting the description and substituting a jokily off-colour name (‘Tostoff’ comes from ‘Toby Tostoff’ in Ulysses and neatly signals the ...”

“... stage of her adult life: they also provide a running commentary on her times. She is a witness to George III’s derangement in 1788, sequestered with him and the Queen in the Palace at Kew. She attends the trial of Warren Hastings. She experiences the Napoleonic regime first-hand during an enforced stay in France between 1803 and 1812. In her teens and ...”

“... with the publication in 2003 of its magisterial sixth volume, written by the general editor, John Baker, and covering the years 1483-1558. It then went back to the beginning, with R.H. Helmholz’s opening volume on early canon law. The rest was silence, until in 2010 the series sailed suddenly and magnificently into port without any of the remaining eight ...”

“... year, sponsors close to the Bush administration set up the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by James Baker, to try to work out the options – realistic rather than simply desirable – now facing the US and its allies. Securing Iraq was part of their brief, but ensuring the security of the US and its interests in the event of a future withdrawal of US forces ...”

“... so completely with the characters he played in films, such as the idealised football player George Gipp in Knute Rockne, All American (1940), that they took up long-term residence in his consciousness. As president, Reagan routinely invoked the Notre Dame star when he implored subordinates to ‘go out there and win one for the Gipper.’ A Regular ...”

“... process in the finished volume is a matter of rhetoric. It was a different thing when Nicholson Baker, writing about his literary relationship with John Updike in U & I, decided not to reread Updike’s work, or to read for the first time the books he hadn’t finished (or hadn’t started). That was a piquant part of the book’s business, an ...”

“... he said. Too far from Figeac? I asked. The house was a distance from the town in the Lot with its baker and café, this was true, but in his phrasing there was, as there could be, an element of self-parody. A profile of him when he was president of the Cambridge Union in 1953, which he must have had a hand in writing himself, said: ‘It is far from the flash ...”

“... was visiting Rice-Davies there. Word of these adventures reached an unscrupulous Labour MP called George Wigg, who started floating them at Westminster. They also reached the press, which began to compete to buy up Keeler. Eventually the Sunday Pictorial (a forerunner of the Sunday Mirror) secured a garbled version of her story for £1000. The article was ...”

“... unilateralism come from the internationalist wing of the Republican Party (Brent Scowcroft, James Baker) rather than from the Democrats or the Left? Samantha Power and David Halberstam did not set out to solve this riddle, but they have unintentionally provided an important part of the answer. Power was motivated to study the history of disappointing US ...”

“... she met the person she would later refer to as her ‘wife’, and also as ‘the monster’. Ida Baker, just a few months older, was a ‘colonial’ too: her family was from Suffolk, but she’d spent the first years of her life in Burma, where her father, an expert in tropical diseases, had been a doctor in the Indian army. She was taller than the other ...”

“... to be granted a further chance. Among them were, as well as Blomfield, H.V. Lanchester and Herbert Baker, remembered, if at all, as the subject of Lutyens’s gaunt jest ‘I met my Bakerloo.’ Despite their insularity and quasi-xenophobia some were adepts of Parisian Beaux-Arts. More usually their idioms were elephantine neo-baroque and ...”

“... still called the shots. Accordingly, it built links to political power. Its connections to George W. Bush have attracted much attention. They were indeed longstanding, with deep roots in Houston’s local politics, and went beyond financial contributions: in 1986, Enron was involved in joint drilling with Bush’s company, Spectrum 7. Enron’s ...”