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“... in Mackayesque bids for topicality, though it’s worth remarking how oddly off the point both Howard Davies’s production at the National Theatre and Gale Edwards’s at the English National Opera looked.) By 1820 even the committed Protestant and North Briton Walter Scott had to recognise, in The Abbot, this guilty but irresistible heroine as a member ...”

“... utilitarianism as a viable moral scheme in a deterministic world (he has hinted, admittedly, that Howard Campbell, the ‘American Haw-Haw’ in Mother Night, is evil because of his pro-Nazi propaganda, even though he is simultaneously broadcasting intelligence for the Allies – but I find this a puzzling account). Vonnegut is interested in guilt, and finds ...”

“... Theatre Club, then the Naphill Village Players), or her perpetual anxiety that her daily help, Mrs Howard, might quit, are related at greater length and with more acuity than the world-historical events that seem only barely to have affected her. As a young woman, in the early 1930s, she had gone so far as to join the Communist Party, but Beauman is right to ...”

“... secretaries of the 1980s, who believed little could be done about crime, things got out of hand. Michael Howard’s tough regime and then Straw’s were necessary to get matters back under control. Yet the fuddy-duddies were on the whole right: imprisoning everyone does not work. Howard set out to exploit the ...”

“... throats.’ We sat smoking, listening to the reaction of the Archbishop and the news of how Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, ‘deplores the event’.The tube to Victoria cost more than double what I had made all day. There was a girl at the top of the stairs when I got there. The place was packed: it was a good spot. After talking to me warily ...”

“... Lord Chamberlain, Eric Penn? ‘He was in my house.’ Sir Edward Ford? ‘He is my cousin.’ Sir Michael Adeane! ‘He is my wife’s cousin.’ The Queen Mother? ‘She was a great friend, before marriage, of my wife’s.’ For Hart-Davis, naturally, it is more a question of active connections, with authors, other publishers, people of one sort and another ...”

“... discovered how to keep diabetic dogs alive with extracts of pancreas. An excellent recent study by Michael Bliss,* a historian at the University of Toronto, establishes that a. the dogs were probably kept alive because Banting, in trying to make them diabetic, failed to remove their own pancreases entirely; b. Banting and Best did little that hadn’t already ...”

“... and does not want to go away, water is central to visions of the dry land. When the historian Michael Cathcart, then a student, asked a university research committee for a Land Rover to do ‘fieldwork’, he was asked by those who thought the vehicle should be used for more scientific purposes: ‘What are you collecting?’ ‘Adjectives,’ Cathcart ...”

“... Romanisation. The policy didn’t go far enough, however, to satisfy the Legion of the Archangel Michael. Founded in 1927, the Legion advocated a spiritually reborn, fully Romanian nation. Religious fervour and support for the Orthodox Church were a crucial part of its message. Violence was also essential. The Legion’s paramilitary branch, appropriately ...”

“... prose to celestial poetry. (They hadn’t read, these promoters of the Penman in Hollywood fable, Michael Moorcock’s minatory letters to J.G. Ballard, the grind of lost years and aborted projects.) So, obviously, when I met Penman, this Schrader yarn was the one I put to him. Why did he come back? Where did it all go wrong? The truth was less ...”

“... the court, and refused to budge from his assertions despite rigorous cross-examination from Sir Michael Havers, that the content of his confessions had been largely suggested to him by the police officers and that he had said what they wanted him to say because their violence had terrified him and reduced him to tears. Mr Armstrong denied that the police ...”

“... about the Oxford set, the Children of the Sun, the Brideshead generation, especially Brian Howard and Evelyn Waugh, who is given special status as an important Deviant from Our Age; and also about Cambridge – about the Spies, of course, who escape being described as Deviant, but also about certain slightly less notorious gentlemen. There was, for ...”

“... read a few more histories of hoarding (Stuff by Randy Frost and Gail Steketee, Clutter by Jennifer Howard) and books about the way to treat it (The Hoarding Handbook, CBT for Hoarding Disorder). I wanted to understand the allure of decluttering, so I bought The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying by Marie Kondo and Decluttering at the Speed of Life by Dana White. I ...”

“... nation; a few years ago this provoked the almost comically reactionary Liberal prime minister John Howard to inveigh against what he called the ‘black armband’ view of his country’s history (as opposed to the proud Gallipoli view), which launched the popular debate that became known in Australia as the ‘history wars’. The main argument was over the ...”

“... overcome the greater, whether to shed innocent blood as the price of breaking humanity’s chains. Michael Scammell has devoted more than 20 years of his own life to producing this tremendous, absorbing biography, hoping to restore Koestler and his work to new generations. It was a bold thing to take on. In the first place, Koestler wrote two books – Arrow ...”