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“... vignettes like Chatwin’s, humorous and on occasion startling. The best of them are memorable. Michael Ignatieff watches Chatwin ‘like an old baboon’ under a mulberry tree in the south of France, having his hair combed by his wife. The ravenous Francis Wyndham and James Fox spoon up a pitifully notional soufflé made from wild strawberries which they ...”

“... good one – about 40,000 pounds more a year.’ The Langhornes were a loyal clan (Nancy’s son Michael Astor called his memoirs Tribal Feeling), so it’s not surprising that Nancy was always giving money to her poorer sisters and buying them houses, nor that she financed her eldest child throughout his life. Bobbie was chucked out of the Army for being ...”

“... how it could have been done better. Puisaye was one of history’s most consistent losers. As a young nobleman he entered the army at 19, only to be made redundant almost at once. In 1792 he commanded the ‘federalist’ army at the ‘battle’ of Brécourt or Pacy-sur-Eure, an engagement remarkable in military history for the fact that there were no ...”

“... person of Ayatollah Khomeini, has reached over the Sunni-Shia sectarian divide, appealing to the young, the poor and the dispossessed in the name of a socially radical Islam that denounces foreign manipulation, abuses of wealth and the corruption of princes. On the other hand, the internal dynamics of the Revolution have taken Iran in the opposite ...”

“... John Stevas did a disservice by exaggerating their likely role. This enabled traditionalists like Michael Foot and Enoch Powell to warn that expanding the role of the committees might distract attention from the proper Parliamentary forum, the floor of the House. On their view, this would damage the position of individual members and of Parliament ...”

“... writers – Bernard Levin, Philippa Pullar – put their hand to food, or food pundits – Michael Smith, Egon Ronay – venture upon writing. The caricaturists of Puritanism did their work early, for the Restoration Court exercised a Reagan-like hold on the media. At this period, one of the 17th century’s better cookery books – apparently the work ...”

“... chief obfuscator. For he has managed to rescue his subject from the hagiographic mausoleum which Michael Foot, Bevan’s official biographer, constructed for him, and replaces the edifying statuary of the authorised version with a fallible mortal whose enduring fascination lies in his fallibility. Foot knew and loved Bevan, of course. Partly because of ...”

“... in Erkenntnis in its great days. And it is of course true that in the Thirties in Oxford the young A.J. Ayer was seen by most of his philosophical elders as expounding an alien and distinctively Germanic doctrine in Language, Truth and Logic. Ayer himself, although recognising how much he shared with the native analytical school of philosophers who had ...”

“... rest of us sat in the kitchen biting our nails and covering our ears as my father, upstairs, gave Michael the beating of his life for that. Another time, the whole family had to sit in front of a children’s panel. That’s what happens in Scotland if a child under 16 commits an offence: the social work department calls in the whole family in an effort to ...”

“... why I want to prolong my childhood so badly.’ At the age of twelve, she writes:Once I was young and all aglow,full of laughter and fun.I was like a blushing rose.Now I am old and forgotten.This world-weariness, the desire to self-mythologise, is easier to take when one remembers what Ditlevsen is up against. Despite her academic achievements, she is ...”

“... one has to admire Rimington for what she’s prepared to say about herself. As a girl and as a young woman she was nervous, anxious and terrified of lightning, and suffered from a form of claustrophobia which made her ‘come out in a cold sweat and start to shake’ if there were any people between her and the doors in a room. Before her wedding (at the ...”

“... a ubiquitous political signifier. On 30 August the literary scholar M.M. Kalburgi was shot by two young men pretending to be students, after he had allegedly made offensive remarks about idol worship. Men like his killers are now in abundant supply in India. They manufacture abuse on social media against anyone faintly critical of Modi; they instruct those ...”

“... protected against stroke. By the mid-1980s Douglas had retired, his cohort taken over by Michael Wadsworth. The Douglas ‘babies’ were by then in their late thirties, and Wadsworth showed that high blood pressure and obesity were more common among those who’d been underweight as babies. There were, it seemed, patterns and cycles to ...”

“... closed canopies or those with small openings. Furthermore, Daniel Kelly has found that in Ireland young oaks in the open were worse affected by mildew than those under a canopy. Conversely, Rackham cites instances of regeneration in existing woods in the Middle Ages, but perhaps does not allow for the effect on the non-oak ‘underwood’ of coppicing for ...”

“... of hostages being slaughtered. You shouldn’t be deceived by the praise of some of the zealous young men who describe you as the sheikh of the slaughterers etc. They do not express the views of most people who admire and support the resistance in Iraq.’ Earlier this year al-Qaida supporters in Jordan told me that not only were they finding it more ...”