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“... the inside cover of Moser’s book like a wall of publicity stills), Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Robert Mapplethorpe, and, later, her partner Annie Leibovitz. Sontag’s post-cancer skunk-stripe hair made her instantly spottable. For those hitting the right places in Manhattan, Sontag sightings were as recurring and oddly reassuring as Warhol sightings, as ...”

“... from the ‘grouch bag’ carried by travelling showmen. His parents were Jewish immigrants: Simon Marrix, of a family of tailors from Alsace-Lorraine, and Minna Schoenberg, the daughter of a Dutch magician who emigrated when his work in Germany ran out in the 1870s. All of the Marxes appear to have been clever with words – ...”

“... was no suggestion that Mr McGregor was involved in the decision. Other former ministers such as Robert Jackson, Tim Yeo and Robert Key have obtained jobs since leaving the government. Earlier this year, the current Conservative Party Deputy Chairman and MP, Dame Angela Rumbold, was forced vigorously to defend her £12,000 ...”

“... of spill. Sunset. Departure ‘in teeth of surmised streamers’. ‘The weasel,’ according to Robert Graves, ‘a favourite disguise of Thessalian witches ... called cedro, usually translated “the artful one”.’ Prynne’s art is in the sanguine play of breath, the repetitions: ‘she, she, she, and only she’. All he requires of us is an ...”

“... the Treasury after New Labour’s victory. Robinson’s fortune had been inflated by dealings with Robert Maxwell, the Channel Island tax havens and a legacy from a satirically named Madame Bourgeois, a Belgian heiress. He had no political base in the Commons and may have felt it politic to bankroll Blair’s closest ally. Mandelson did not declare his ...”

“... with the speed of the initial victory led to an underestimation of the problems of occupation.Simon Akam’s account of British military involvement in the war for the greater Middle East (2001-present) begins with a portrait of the British army at the start of the millennium. The UK’s contribution to the Iraq invasion force involved the 7th Armoured ...”

“... Winter’s Tale dramatises a prose romance from 1588, Pandosto, appropriately written by the same Robert Greene who accused Shakespeare of being a plagiaristic ‘upstart crow’, while both The Tempest and Cymbeline borrow from Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, a creaky anonymous play of the early 1580s about an exiled courtier who lives in a cave and ...”

“... are audibly mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the ...”

“... to readers of the Sunday Times and the Spectator. Carey’s cousins in populism sometimes include Simon Jenkins, Paul Johnson, A.N. Wilson and the late Auberon Waugh. An easy moralism animates this worldview. Picasso was a pig; Edmund Gosse was ‘a bore’; D.H. Lawrence hit Frieda and wanted to exterm-inate whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob ...”

“... but remains tirelessly cogent in its pursuit of it. Of the famous shows, perhaps only the David Simon classic The Wire adds the dimensions of fallibility and compromise to the image of the police. Here the police sometimes act with righteous violence, sometimes not. Often they are stymied by the peevishness and self-interest of police bureaucracy. They live ...”

“... cinema he said he wanted to create a modern movie theatre. That was fine, he was told by Robert Stern, who was overseeing the town’s look, as long as Pelli understood that as far as Celebration was concerned, modern ended in the 1930s. The future as defined by the brochure from Michael Eisner’s Disney Corporation was to be found not in Walt’s ...”

“... Hellman is not the only snotty famous person to fall under her jaded eye. James Taylor and Carly Simon, Hellman’s guests one sunny afternoon, ‘smile stiffly’ at Mahoney when she brings coffee in on a serving tray, but otherwise ignore her. Mike Nichols and John Hersey win grudging approval – the former for giving her a nice tip, the latter for his ...”

“... there is no likelier a subject of a missing play or plays. We happen to know, from the diary of Simon Forman, that a play acted by that company in 1611 was called, or at least was about, ‘Richard II’. From Forman’s description the play was plainly not Shakespeare’s – or the play performed on 7 February 1601. Do the descriptions of the February ...”

“... that Proust was too much of a snob – but they had a number of friends in common, including Robert d’Humières, the model for Robert de Saint-Loup in A la recherche du temps perdu. D’Humières was working on the French translation of The Custom of the Country when he was killed in action in 1916, and there was ...”

“... Nearer home, the continued intractability of the Northern Ireland conflict has led Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, to condemn the current initiative by the British and Irish Governments to hold new talks on the province for its ‘centralism’. Instead, Jenkins offers the prospect of devolution to ethnic enclaves, the Catholic ones being ...”