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“... him sleep in their apartment when her parents are in town. Bix is Black; Lizzie’s parents are white and Texan (her parents ‘would just know’). In The Candy House, Bix and Lizzie are married with four children. But he’s nostalgic for his graduate student days and the pot-fuelled conversations he used to overhear between Lizzie and her friends: ‘How ...”

“... Australia. Some Great Thing resounds with the sound of working men: Jerry McGuinty, Edgar Davies, Tony Espolito, Johnny Cooper, Mario Calzone are ‘the usual muddy mix’, men who can stand ‘for 19 hours in the rain’, building houses and talking to each other the way men do – ‘I can’t cunt find fuckin nails ass, shit, you seen them, hoor?’ Not ...”

“... and an African American ambassador to the UN (Susan Rice, now the national security adviser). White Americans are always being reminded – rightly – that they constitute a shrinking group and that the future belongs to the African American, Latino and Asian minorities. Perhaps this was the sunset vote. The failure of the American Dream, as we are told ...”

“... over two hundred pages, with more than a hundred colour plates, as well as a series of black and white portrait photographs of the artists taken by Johnnie Shand Kydd. It has five catalogue essays, several pages of artists’ biographies, a bibliography and, as the very last item in the book, a six-page checklist of the 110 works in the exhibition, with an ...”

“... for the occasional progress by limousine across the bridge. The mansion he lived in, nicknamed the White House, stood on top of the highest hill in the vicinity of Manhattan. He was the Godfather of the Gambino Family of the Cosa Nostra, having succeeded to the throne as a cousin, married to the sister-in-law, of Carlo Gambino, who had in his day been ...”

“... evidence against them by no fewer than three intending diarists. There they sat, Dick, Barbara and Tony, scribbling away while the nation’s fate was being decided. No wonder there was resentment among the less literary members of the Cabinet. They didn’t think it was fair. It is also a misfortune that all three of those diarists were broadly speaking on ...”

“... fellow lodger in a gloomy house in St John’s Wood. She was old, shrivelled, big-nosed and very white, and she lay, propped up by pillows, under a frayed coverlet on a brass bed.    ‘So you are the little boy at the top of the castle. I hear your footsteps on the stairs. Why do you always run? A young gentleman should walk, not run.’    I was ...”

“... met his family there, while my eight-year-old daughter was marvelling at his masterpiece, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. It seems strange that an artist such as Jeff Koons can include a gigantic puppy dog in his repertoire, to massive acclaim, while Sandaldjian’s minute Disney figures are admired only by a tiny group of cognoscenti. After all, as ...”

“... and the TV cameras, and behave like a family inside a house, unaware they’re being watched. Tony Greig and a minor English ex-bowler were sitting in the commentator’s box and discussing plans and strategies, while the little microphone in one of the stumps, placed there to detect the sound of a nick, eavesdropped on two players conversing: ‘Lagta ...”

“... of his friends up to my mother. The man stood at the end of her bed with his trousers undone. ‘Tony said it would be OK,’ he said. These drunken friends sometimes visited our house on their days off work, but when my father went to the front door – groggy, doing up his dressing-gown – he didn’t recognise them and sent them away. Fights broke out on ...”

“... supply-led food bank?’ another peer wanted to know. Freud wrote the Lex column in the FT before Tony Blair asked him to lead an independent review of the benefits system (he completed a draft in three weeks, despite admitting he ‘didn’t know anything about welfare at all’), so perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. ‘If that sounded ...”

“... Pasmore’s composition stops and starts. Perhaps only in the pictures of Wendy Blood, a pink-and-white blonde whom he married in 1940, is there a sense of unselfconscious connection between painter and subject, though even here Pasmore said that he was cocking a snook at Renoir’s sugary nudes. His career would seem to have owed something to the inferiority ...”

“... to them, for the sake of its own violently enacted and no less violently preserved self-regard. Tony Blair’s increasingly desperate statements of conviction would then simply be an inflated example of the trend. ‘I believe in myself’ is the last great performative statement of an idealist on the rocks. It also exposes the lie since, believing in ...”

“... after Labour’s defeat in the 1970 General Election did Benn break with the Wilsonian agenda. The white heat of the technological revolution had cooled. Benn did not dissimulate his ambition to lead the Labour Party, and as late as 1975 Wilson could flatter and cajole Benn by saying: ‘I’ve got to do this. When you have my job, you’ll have to do ...”

“... increased the importance of the media managers. When the Northern Ireland negotiations got serious Tony Blair took Alistair Campbell into the room with him and insisted that Mo Mowlam remain outside. David Trimble was astonished but that’s how it always is with New Labour. Andrew Rawnsley records how the momentous decision that Britain would not join the ...”