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“... us, we have never acquired the adult mind.’ 18 February. Ned Sherrin’s memorial service at St Paul’s, Covent Garden. A friendly service interspersed with songs, some from Sondheim, some from Sherrin and Brahms, but with none of them as tuneful as the hymns. The audience is very responsive, and it’s the only occasion in my experience that the lesson ...”

“... for the boy the only reporter available at that moment was a new and overeager recruit, one Harry Hunt, good on fishing, archaeology and Bible history. Mullane told him to find out all about this famous painter who had just died, shouting after him as he went: ‘Try Lennox Yeates.’ Hunt who had so far learned only one useful thing about reporting ...”

“... seem, in such a sentence, already to hear the elegantly despairing voices of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Some of Barthes’s other generalities are rather glib too (‘a modern masterpiece is impossible,’ ‘order ... is always a murder in intention’), and his eager, stabs at historians’ history (‘Now the 1850s bring the concurrence of three new ...”

“... it to Pennsylvania, which was probably just as well. (In his shaggy-dog history of ideas, Madoc, Paul Muldoon imagines the high-minded debacle that would have ensued had they ever got there.) Fiery Southey grew cooler and cooler. He began by suggesting that the party might perhaps work up to the full American dream by way of a small farm in Wales (Coleridge ...”

“... and to become, in the process, a small-scale entrepreneur. Smith quotes a nicely balanced entry in Harry Williams’s diary (an important and rather affecting source throughout) for 7 February 1950: ‘I decide to go to Hereford with honey and am hopeful of a contract for the rest of it. Went Tory heckling in the evening.’ There is no single template for ...”

“... horizons; and, eventually, he asked Evans to contribute his photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge to Harry and Caresse Crosby’s edition of The Bridge. With apparent casualness – the same casualness that got him into Williams – Evans went on to meet just about anyone in the art and literary worlds who it was or would be worth his while to know, among them ...”

“... impressively for his gear. CNN was here for some really significant story – the marriage of Sir Paul McCartney and anti-landmine campaigner Heather Mills, perhaps; a shade less probably, the wedding in St Eugene’s Cathedral, Londonderry, of Gráinne, daughter of Northern Ireland’s Education Minister Martin McGuinness (not yet knighted for his varied ...”

“... Liberal Party and then high commissioner to the UK. In June, Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort held a secret meeting with Russians at Trump Tower. In July, after the hacking of the Democratic National Committee was widely reported, Downer informed American intelligence about his conversation with Papadopoulos. The FBI investigated and found ...”

“... second husband, another Stanley, boozy, womanising, the proud owner of a Mark One Jaguar. Harry, the editor of the newspaper for which Stanley works, mean, unclubbable, undersexed, a non-driver, who nevertheless comes good as a supportive male when he makes Stanley the motoring correspondent. And Nash, the doctor, who (even if henpecked at home) can ...”

“... the colour of spring.’ Champcommunal was more fashion-conscious than Todd; she knew people like Paul Poiret – the first person to design a dress, it’s said, that a woman could put on by herself. It’s not clear how the early editors were chosen, or what qualifications were expected in a country where to be fashionable had long meant to be vulgar and ...”

“... the shortlist, with Naipaul’s A Bend in the River the clear frontrunner. Julian Barnes remembers Paul Theroux, who was judging, saying he would ‘skim out into the pampas’ the candidates he considered non-starters; back from Patagonia, there he sat at the Booker dinner, ‘a polite smile on his face’. ‘I couldn’t help enjoying the ...”

“... old speaker’s young bride asks him, on their wartime wedding night, about the planes above them: Harry, do they ever collide? I do not think it has ever happened, Oh my bride, my bride.Paul Muldoon reads this as poignant, hears the last line as exasperated and senses an ‘almost inevitable lack of consummation’ between ...”

“... in 1906, the cherished only child of highly educated, non-religious Jewish parents. Her father, Paul, was an electrical engineer with an amazing home library – she first read Kant, Arendt told Gaus, at fourteen. The Arendts were socialist fellow-travellers, Hannah’s mother, Martha, in particular. The ‘impressionistic, romantic’ admiration of ...”

“... appreciative of language. The colours 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 ...”

“... about it all, taking shooting classes, learning how to be fast on the draw, the lot. In Dirty Harry, Villiers said, Clint Eastwood says this is the most powerful handgun in the world so I reckon, OK, they got my brother but they’re sure as hell not getting me. But we thought your sister-in-law did it, we said. Maybe she did, he said. Quite possibly. But ...”