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“... view. The polls show quite clearly that public opinion moved against the Tories long before John Smith died in 1994 – and that the reasons for this shift had far more to do with the rise in VAT on fuel, Norman Lamont’s Exchange Rate Mechanism fiasco, and Michael Heseltine’s pit closures than with any decision of a ...”

“... leading paleontologists’. Mr Horner appears again on page 147. On page 190, having dismissed Michael Crichton as a practitioner of ‘standard alarmist environmentalism’, Gingrich muses: ‘Why not aspire to build a real Jurassic Park? (It may not be at all impossible, you know.)’ ‘My early professional dreams,’ he lets fall a few pages ...”

“... names. One of the most noteworthy was The Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936), edited by Michael Roberts. In 1932, Roberts, a contributor to the Criterion, had edited for the Woolfs at the Hogarth Press a poetry anthology called New Signatures – a symptom of an international rush towards the ‘new’. Geoffrey Grigson’s magazine New Verse ...”

“... Farson, in The Gilded Gutter Life of Francis Bacon (also 1993), gives it a passing reference. Michael Peppiatt, in Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma (2008), gives the year of Bacon’s departure for the cottage as 1942, adding: ‘The enforced idleness, free of wartime anxieties and the distractions of London, served as a catalyst to his real ...”

“... The EU electoral observers duly documented this self-restraint, but the head of their mission, Michael Cashman, agreed with the EU delegate in Kigali, David MacRae, not to go public about it – it might have raised uncomfortable questions. For his re-election in August 2010, Kagame approved a slight erosion of his Soviet-style popularity, allowing his ...”

“... two pages devoted to its royal house, which is rather modest considering that His Majesty King Michael I of Romania serves as Chairman of the Comité de Patronage of the Société des Amis de I’Almanach de Gotha 1998. From these pages I learn that Michael or Mihai was born to King Carol in 1921 and ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... It reconciled the toughs with the aesthetes, proletarian writers with the Logan Pearsall Smith generation (Connolly had been for a time his secretary); Orwells with Sitwells; the new Continental heavyweights like Giono, Sartre and Camus with snugly parochial English eccentrics. It inaugurated a new society of letters, open and unstuffy, which in a ...”

“... began the countdown to the November re-election date. This campaign gathered such momentum that Michael Heseltine, the obvious contender, would have been badly damaged had he not stood. In June this year the same countdown had begun when Major cut the campaign short with a pre-emptive resignation, his calculation presumably being that the requirement of ...”

“... and ‘the tyranny of reason’. Aleister Crowley used peyote in his séances. Frederick Madison Smith, the grandson of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon religion, explored it as a possible means of achieving religious ecstasy. Smith also lobbied against the prohibition of the ...”

“... Campion, Morris, Christina Rossetti, John Crowe Ransom, Wyndham Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stevie Smith. I would think a life of diverse affections could be made upon such affiliations. But Grigson seems to need to be enraged or disgusted, too. Else why would he go to the disfiguring bother of writing, publishing and reprinting his ugly references to Ezra ...”

“... main rival for the Tory Party leadership and the man long considered the favourite to succeed Michael Howard. Davis flopped. He spoke woodenly from behind a lectern without any of Cameron’s natural ease, looking and sounding like someone who would rather have been almost anywhere else. The final peroration fell so flat that Davis had to signal with his ...”

“... important affinity’ between Marvell and the ‘gifted group of Ulster poets: Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon’ – poets surely very unlike the Member of Parliament for Hull. He asserts that ‘many of these are creatively grateful to Marvell,’ and then suggests, even more extravagantly, that ‘it is likely that there ...”

“... despised the very notion of the ‘long term’. Nobody tries to make a case for James Callaghan, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock as candidates for the pantheon and some of the devotion to the late John Smith derives, no doubt, from a desperate endeavour to find a leader of note somewhere. Hence this book. ‘Hugh Gaitskell ...”