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“... extracts from a video taken from an interview carried out by an eminent neurologist, Professor John Hodges, and presumably taped for research purposes. It’s sanctioned, one imagines, by John Bayley, whose efforts on behalf of his late wife and her reputation make Max Clifford seem timid and retiring. One lesson of this ...”

“... were too bright perhaps.7 March. Read and enjoy Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts about the lure of in-between places and the edges of cities and other communities. I feel I was on to this years ago in my play The Old Country, when Hilary, a spy in the Foreign Office, describes the venues where he met his Soviet contact; it’s also ...”

“... inaugural address carried the stamp of hot ambition even in its salutation: ‘Chief Justice Roberts, President Carter, President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you.’ What were the people of the world doing here? It has been conjectured that Trump was greeting a blood-brotherhood of populari ...”

“... was equality officer, drafted the letter for her. She was up against a popular sitting MP, Ernie Roberts, as well as the leader of the local council, who had been all but anointed his eventual successor. Abbott spoke last at the selection meeting, aware that no one in the room thought she could win. Her speech began with her Uncle Charlie in Jamaica and ...”

“... viewpoint not in the forefront, but the new breed of historian – Niall Ferguson, Andrew Roberts and Norman Stone – all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A sneer is never far away and ...”

“... from the shadows. The transition to multiparty rule in 1989 did little to change this. As Hugh Roberts points out in The Battlefield: Algeria 1998-2002 (2003), an almost indispensable book, the introduction of pluralism merely ‘replaced a monolithic façade with a pluralist one’. The real power in Algeria resides, as it always has, with the ...”

“... commentary on Britain . . . And it shifted in tone; from the anxious to the apocalyptic. In John Fowles’s novel Daniel Martin, published in 1977, the expatriate narrator says of his homeland: ‘England is already a thing in a museum, a dying animal in a zoo.’ Beckett pulls many other examples (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ...”

“... with Skipper, a gay man eighteen years her junior. A good-looking, rich white Bahamian, Richard Roberts strung her along, joining in her flirtatious games, then swiftly offloaded her. Her sister Hilary told her to ‘grow up’, in other words, to give up.Byrne convinced me that Pym loved and suffered. ‘Pouring out her heart’ in her novels may have been ...”

“... it could make him seem unfeeling. One of his pupils, who was briefly a pupil of mine, was Adam Roberts, now Professor of International Relations at Oxford. Adam was a demy at Magdalen and was thought likely to get a first but didn’t; he was understandably a little mortified but his self-reproach can’t have been helped when he received a note from ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... too good to resist. ‘This officer of artillery never misses an opportunity for attack,’ John Gawsworth, an admiring contemporary, observed. William Rothenstein thought him ‘armed and armoured, like a tank, ready to cross any country, however rough and hostile’. He certainly had a genius for pugnacity, no doubt partly encouraged by the example ...”

“... the State, and Law and Order (1978), written in collaboration with Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, but with its great and terrifying sweeps of synthesis – not to mention their calm, dry, paddingly Socratic delivery – commonly assumed to be the work mainly of Hall. Everywhere the ‘moral ...”

“... in which Powell pays tribute to the ‘insight’ and ‘courage’ of his fellow Black Country MP John Stonehouse, soon to become postmaster general and then regarded as a coming man in the Labour Party, perhaps even a future leader. Stonehouse had denounced as ‘a canker’ the campaign by local Sikh bus conductors to be allowed to wear their turbans at ...”

“... winds were in my favour.’ Taking advantage of these winds, he writes beautifully about Julia Roberts: Sometimes on a Friday night at the end of work, she would give me a ride back to New York on the Sony jet. Then I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B. With a cocktail in a ...”