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“... God that on becoming a British subject I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to his Majesty King George VI, his heirs and successors according to law’ seemed not to be a problem. Fuchs is a brilliant mathematician and physicist; he also has an accurate memory and a remarkable ability to explain difficult concepts lucidly. I had some experience of this ...”

“... if Maschler got rich in the process. Wesker’s remarks recalled the pugilist Larry Holmes on Don King: ‘If this is exploitation, keep it rollin’ in.’ Wesker’s affection, however, is measured. After a dispute about whether a play should be published before or after its first performance, the affronted playwright ‘did not speak to me’, Maschler ...”

“... the introduction of modern print technology. We are at the dawn of a new technological age: what Anthony Smith describes as ‘the third revolution in communication’ – the others were the invention of writing and of printing. The computerisation of print through electronic technology opens up the possibility of an abundance of information becoming ...”

“... thing, with a ghastly woodcut on it. Nobody knew how this woodcut got on it. There was a piece by Anthony Powell called ‘A Reference for Mellors’, which was about somebody coming to Lady Chatterley for a reference for a gamekeeper. The magazine sort of launched me on a career, because Alan Pryce-Jones, who was then the editor of the TLS, gave me a lot of ...”

“... of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not ...”

“... their majesties’ heads onto bodies sketched out in conventional Islamic fashion, converting the King Emperor and his consort into something very different from their squat Anglo-Germanic selves. Even when British aesthetics were imported into colonies wholesale meanings shifted. Thomas Metcalf remarks that the Parliament building in Ottawa, like ...”

“... impression that Byzantium matters as and when it pertains to a Latin, Western European history. Anthony Kaldellis will have none of this. He reprehends the terms ‘Byzantine’ and ‘Byzantium’ as the fraudulent legacy of 19th-century scholars determined to claim the heritage of Roman antiquity for (North-) Western Europe, dispossessing its rightful ...”

“... a fact of life. He wades barefoot through the polluted waters that flood Miami Beach during king tides, visits a family living in the ‘blackwater slum’ of Makoko, just outside Lagos, and interviews Barack Obama during his historic trip to Alaska. The book skips along with the brisk pace of magazine journalism – some of the chapters first appeared ...”

“... task force. Much of the anger in John Silkin’s posthumously published book is directed against Anthony Wedgwood Benn. Labour’s internal wars of the late Seventies are refought here, culminating in the 1981 election for the Party’s deputy leadership, in which Silkin stood as standard-bearer for the non-Bennite Left. Although he was eliminated in the ...”

“... present in his son-in-law Barry Humphries’s autobiography. Both are interested in themselves (Anthony Powell remarks in his memoirs that to be interested in oneself, as opposed to being merely egocentric, is one of the rarest of gifts) but neither takes himself very seriously. So little is Humphries concerned to present an image – the worst thing an ...”

“... but not hesitant. Parzival is a questing knight who is too polite to ask an obviously ailing king: ‘What’s wrong with you?’ As Ziolkowski says, he unthinkingly obeys the protocol of courtly etiquette, and thereby forgets the Christian imperative of charity. Arguably, he has repressed the instinct of compassion; in that sense, he is inhibited. But ...”

“... a West London estate agent. His best friends are Tony, Nodge and Colin. Diamond Tony – formally, Anthony Diamonte – is a flash Italian hairdresser: handsome, charming, apparently successful, he has a flair for cruelty. Nodge – or Noj, Jon backwards – is an overweight cab driver with intellectual pretensions. Colin – just Colin – is a computer nerd ...”

“... Arabic’. Glyn’s autobiography appeared in 1936. An excellent life by her grandson, Anthony Glyn, was published in 1955, revised in 1988. Why, then, another biography? Joan Hardwick, author of An Immodest Violet (1990), a study of Violet Hunt (whose novels included – yes – The Tiger Skin), evidently felt irresistibly drawn to another ...”

“... of the ‘rules of war’, and that James II lacked legitimacy because he was no longer legal King of England. He was surely a king to the Irish who fought at the Boyne, and for that reason a threat, not only to the religious unity of the Williamite settlement, but to its whole territorial integrity. The early 18th ...”

“... of espionage, where every straight action is mirrored by treachery, where the agent provocateur is king. Charles Nicholl has previously written on alchemy in the Elizabethan age. ‘As above, so below’: this was the maxim of alchemists. It works in the real world too. The factious giants of Elizabeth’s court are supported by a vast root-system of ...”