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“... hesitantly into working-men’s establishments (but never into the sporting locker room). I was keen to learn what secret power plays he had discovered behind the closed doors of elite clubland. In fact there aren’t any, and he makes only a passing claim for the continuing political significance of clubs – for oligarchs and spies, apparently. Can this ...”

“... for statehood jostled anxiously in the corridors alongside those who’d been formally invited, ‘keen as saints for a front seat on Judgment Day’. Into their midst glided a young, clever and passionately idealistic clerk from the Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson, who had left his wife in the arms of others but found consolation in dreams of the glorious ...”

“... sometimes only a few pages apart, without seeming to register the discrepancy. On page 71 he is keen to see an execution – someone who saw Savonarola die at the stake isn’t frightened by blood or violence done to the body. Four pages later Enard recounts at length Michelangelo’s nightmare of being tortured and burned at the stake, until he wakes up in ...”

“... been looking in the suitcase, I’ve been consulting other sources: my father’s younger brother, Peter, now a robust 86; family photographs; stamp albums; public records; other people’s suitcases; books; barely legible notes despatched to me by my mother, who has a macular hole and a keen memory and styles herself ...”

“... casts on stable identities and notes the perplexing shifts in the characters’ emotions. His keen interest in the fluidity of the self, something explored by several of his favourite writers, returns again and again in his thoughts on late style, which are attentive to surprise changes of direction, to inconsistency, experiment, ‘anachronism and ...”

“... frauds and cruel extortions’, the inhumanity of serfdom and the instruments of torture in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg. De Lacy Evans’s book presented Russia as a perfect autocracy, divided between slaves and masters, and focused exclusively on military expansion and colonisation.This image of barbaric absolutism gained greatly from the ...”

“... seminal address to the American Economic Association respectfully invoked. Yet this, for all its keen theoretical insights, evinces scepticism and caution about their immediate application to policy. It is in this respect curiously similar to Keynes’s General Theory, which it is often supposed, by readers unfamiliar with either text, to have superseded as ...”

“... exploit the fears of all sections of society who suffer from Conservative attempts to demolish it. Peter Shore displays the greatest awareness of such an approach when he writes what is a remarkably frank eulogy of both Labour and Conservative governments after 1945. Gerald Kaufman, who, incidentally, is going to restore Rutland and the Soke of ...”

“... judge by this account, that Weekend World was creating its own network of clever, ambitious men. Peter Jay, Peter Mandelson, Christopher Hitchens, Brian Walden and their slightly geeky colleagues turned out to be a more influential and politically adept group than Panorama’s fist-fighting war reporters. And none was more ...”

“... followers to create ‘institutions or out-patient clinics … where treatment shall be free’. Keen to contribute to a better postwar world, Freud hoped that one day these charitable clinics would be state funded – ‘the neuroses,’ he insisted, ‘threaten public health no less than tuberculosis.’ Max Eitingon, the psychoanalyst who funded the first ...”

“... with him. The story goes that Schoenberg dismissed him, telling him he lacked an ear for harmony. Peter Yates’s book Twentieth-Century Music: Its Evolution from the End of the Harmonic Era into the Present Era of Sound (1968), reported Schoenberg as saying that Cage was ‘not a composer – but an inventor of genius’, a back-handed compliment that stuck ...”

“... problems, such as those endured on the last of the Pink Panther movies. The CAA agent had got Peter Sellers three million dollars to do the film. He got Blake Edwards, who hated Sellers, the same amount (not to direct, but because he co-owned the rights). The agent also represented the scriptwriter, the director, and two of the producers. ‘It was about ...”

“... to her local bookseller and read a lot of fiction, poetry and theology. Her husband too was a keen reader and they enjoyed discussing which characters they admired and loathed.One novel gripped them more than all the rest: Richardson’s gigantic Clarissa, published serially (with agonising gaps) between December 1747 and December 1748. At the end of ...”

“... army who had lost his family in the Holocaust for killing a German during the war. Haines is keen now to emphasise the moments when he contradicted his boss at the Mirror. But Maxwell was always one step ahead. When asked why he wanted Haines to write an account of his life, Maxwell said: ‘Two reasons: one, because I could rely on him to do a good ...”

“... synagogue. He was a profoundly devout man, and left Levy with both a deep religious faith and a keen wish to experience a wider world. The portrait of the pious, financially straitened, hard-working Jewish Hackney of his childhood is interesting, and shows a life which has moved elsewhere: the synagogue where he studied for his bar mitzvah is now a mosque ...”