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“... and narrator, for this narrator is never resolved into a character. Here he is meeting one ‘Jack Verso’, an American academic who is on the trip boasting about his mission to ‘deconstruct the Grand Narratives of the great Age of Reason project’ (he is even given a baseball cap sporting the motto ‘I Love Deconstruction’). ‘I know his type at ...”

“... startups were founded by women in their thirties, and I’ve seen companies with all-female staff. Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who has access to the data of the billion or so Chinese consumers on the Taobao and Alipay platforms, says that ‘women are the economy, today and in the future.’ One recent report suggests that 79 per cent of technology firms ...”

“... 1979 and Costain: £105,650 since 1979), John Milne (Royal Insurance: £110,500 since 1979), and Ian Fraser (formerly of Lazards: £86,100 since 1979). The same list in 1987 saw knighthoods bestowed on Frank Gibb (chairman and chief executive of Taylor Woodrow which had given £35,000 to the Party in the previous financial year) and Derek Alun-Jones (a ...”

“... and devoid of the kind of imaginative leadership called for by such a difficult situation. Dr Ian Paisley’s extremist Democratic Unionist Party was the inevitable gainer: British failure to pursue unambiguously the clear-cut policy of ‘no devolution without power-sharing’ had played straight into his hands. The second precondition for a resolution ...”

“... and visit interesting churches and gardens or have dinner in Cambridge with the historian Jack Plumb. Her bad temper was due in part to intellectual frustration. She was an intelligent woman and her mother’s refusal to provide her with any formal education was one source of resentment in their generally fractious relationship. Another pleasure of ...”

“... thinking on North-South relations. This was pioneered by Lemass, adhered to by the underestimated Jack Lynch, and pursued most eloquently by Garret Fitzgerald. Charles Haughey, who had tried to arm the Provisional IRA in 1969, later claimed that he played a key part in what would be called ‘the peace process’, but this now seems as threadbare as his ...”

“... personified as a young woman with long, flowing hair, defiantly carrying a rifle against a Union Jack, and proclaiming: ‘Deserted! Well – I Can Stand Alone.’ Part of Godson’s theme is Unionist or Protestant solitariness, their distrust of the English, and commitment to the two-nations doctrine, which isn’t much discussed nowadays but shaped ...”

“... was also a second song, a ghostly number about Saddleworth Moor and the murders of children by Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, a song which seemed to bring place and personality together in a way that nobody had done in British pop before. Morrissey and Marr were a couple of arch-fans, a conglomeration of good influences and proper hungers, and their band, The ...”

“... He Said’ became the title for a 1964 novel by Jeremy Larner, which in 1971 became a Jack Nicholson film; the same title later served an anthology of poems about cars, an episode of at least one television show, and at least a dozen magazine columns, including a recent New Yorker piece about congestion charging (‘Don’t Drive, He ...”

“... handicap of six makes him superior to other obsessive literary golfers such as P.G. Wodehouse and Ian Fleming, and only a little inferior to Malcolm Lowry and Patrick Hamilton, who were golfers as well as drinkers of championship class. This devotion to sport went with a declared aversion to women and, at this stage, to sex in any form. He told Carpenter in ...”

“... about kings and queens is as voracious as ever. In the past couple of decades authors such as Ian Mortimer and Alison Weir have been bashing out books at a furious pace, including The Perfect King (yes, it was Edward III) and Queens of the Age of Chivalry. In the last few years, publishers have jumped on the Game of Thrones bandwagon, peddling titles such ...”

“... street in the air. Aesthetics were secondary, programme was all. The designers of Park Hill, Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, boasted that they didn’t draw a single elevation while designing one of the largest buildings in Europe. For Banham, this promised an architecture autre, where most accepted canons of form and order could be discarded in favour of ...”

“... and sordid, of respectable diplomacy. Jeremy was the first person I came across who admired Ian Fleming, and I still have an edition of Live And Let Die that he plucked from the ex libris shelf of Boots Library for a shilling in 1956 and presented to me on the spot. Two other things were in the air – death and drink, which in Jeremy’s case went hand ...”

“... be a herd of revisionist historians and propagandists, all assuring us that if he had lived, ‘Jack’ would never have allowed the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to do anything so barbarous and stupid. Why, just the night before he fell to an assassin, he was ‘wryly’ reconsidering …I am not merely speculating here. During the last freshet of Kennedy-era ...”

“... I figured it didn’t matter, it didn’t affect the poetry. But it did. Later I came out, and Ian Young included me in his Male Muse anthology, so that I’d officially gone public. Now, I wouldn’t have expected it to make so much difference as it did. In the title poem of ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’ [written between ...”