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“... About ten years ago I went to see Michael Frayn’s Noises Off in the West End. The play has been revived, and rewritten, many times since its first run in 1982 and its place in the farcical canon is undisputed. One consequence of its (entirely deserved) reputation for being hilarious is that audiences strongly expect it to make them laugh ...”

“... like many papers before it, was investigating how Mandelson could afford to purchase a Notting Hill home, have it done up by a minimalist designer with a maximum rate-card, while buying a £70,000 house in Hartlepool, dressing in Savile Row suits and patronising the best restaurants. (The questions have still not been answered, incidentally. We now know ...”

“... and in the private offices of those who serve and facilitate extreme wealth.Meanwhile, in Notting Hill and Kensington, they are burrowing compulsively and competitively, getting others to chew out huge quantities of earth on their behalf, right down to the level of the Underground lines. This form of sub-architectural excavation, disturbing roots and ...”

“... Michael Moorcock’s novel honours the loonies of London. It seems there are more of them every year, especially since – by one of the more perverse acts of enlightenment – the asylums were emptied in the Seventies. One sees the London mad everywhere in the streets and parks: ranters, mutterers, arm-wavers. The quieter cases are charitably allowed into the public bars of seedy pubs; I once saw one huddled over his light ale with an antique mahogany-cased ECT apparatus perched beside him ...”

“... there is no greater ambition than to live and die in Santa Monica. ‘If I ever get the choice,’ Michael Moorcock declares, ‘that’s where I would cheerfully end my days.’ This is simply the most recent turn in what has proved to be one of the greatest tragic-comic intercontinental love stories of all time. Not too long ago lucred Yankee cognoscenti ...”

“... that out is only the start of an immense process of comparison and collation, manageable (as Michael Reeve wryly remarked 17 years ago) only under ideal conditions unlikely ever to be fulfilled. That said, Reeve’s new text, a collation of 11 of the most important manuscripts, is probably the best we’ve had since Geoffrey put his pen down, and it ...”

“... government would have handled the Falklands crisis with greater skill and to greater effect. Michael Foot speaks in the tones of Churchill in the Second World War and of Lloyd George in the First. It is fair to say that these two statesmen have often been numbered among Michael’s heroes. Still, I never expected to ...”

“... cattail’. Then he has to stay put, from mid-March to the first week in April, hanging out with Michael, the Fish and Wildlife Warden, and Rollin the 82-year-old twitcher, just watching, feeling homesick, writing down Rollin’s reminiscences, leafing through the Gideon Bible in his motel room. If that is what some phases of the journey were like, well ...”

“... another’ is followed by twenty seconds of silence ‘and then a chaffinch starts and/then another’ is followed by another twenty seconds of silence ‘and starts and starts’. This allows Oswald to do what she has always wanted to do, which is to represent being in time, where things recur and repeat, and in which attempts to pause and linger on the moment get thwarted by the necessary flow of time ...”

“... a single taker for his doughty defence of Beaverbrook’s reputation, or for the proposition that Michael Foot would make a great prime minister. For many people mention of Alan’s name immediately brings to mind the great brouhaha over the Regius Chair in History. His friends, perhaps not entirely discouraged by Alan, have tended to treat this as a sort of ...”

“... just about the time that Whitlam was entering Federal politics – stay in my mind. In Broken Hill, the mining town, some fifty miners were playing two-up at night, out in the open, and placing bets that would have been the equivalent of a couple of weeks’ wages for any British miner. Dubbo, a small country town, possessed sixty tennis courts. The ...”

“... of any pay-off with undecided voters. Had he prevailed, he would have found allies on Capitol Hill. John McCain, for instance, has said of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment that it ‘clearly demonstrates how the Arctic region is acting as the canary in the coal mine’. Earlier this year, McCain and Joseph Lieberman sponsored a bipartisan bill calling ...”

“... often with himself; writes books on Browning and Dickens, writes The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and pursues the religious controversies that lead him to Heretics and Orthodoxy. It’s worth remembering that even when fully declared, his faith at this time is very broadly Christian, a matter of the Incarnation and its consequences. He joined the Roman ...”

“... for Jaurès’s assassination in 1914. But we can think again about the life of words, as Geoffrey Hill’s poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy eloquently invites us to do. ‘Did Péguy kill Jaurès?’ is Hill’s question. ‘Must men stand by what they write?’ Or women? His note to the poem now sounds ...”

“... and influential writers and preachers of his age to a dull and worthy figure. Both Greaves and Michael Davies appear to accept, and even collude with, Bunyan’s diminished presence in contemporary British culture. Bunyan, however, remains an enduring presence in Ulster Protestantism. In a lecture given many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in ...”