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“... rap for the exquisite but evil Margot Beste-Chetwynde, and reflects onthe undeniable cogency of Peter Beste-Chetwynde’s ‘You can’t see Mamma in prison, can you?’ The more Paul considered this, the more he perceived it to be the statement of a natural law. He appreciated the assumption of comprehension with which ...”

“... Ovett style of things) as a ‘cabaret dancer’. Above all, Coe has been coached by his father, Peter, who has impressed himself on the public mind, rightly or wrongly, as a self-made authoritarian gifted with inflexible will, prescient ambition and a strikingly neo-Victorian belief in ‘scientific’ progress. It comes as no surprise to learn from the new ...”

“... that if children drink tap water it will make them transgender.Before going into the convention hall, I encountered Ramaswamy and held up my recorder as he expounded on unity. It takes a truly intelligent man to be so stupid. He wanted to oppose ‘the fake astroturf version of unity’ and go for something real, he said, but he didn’t acknowledge for a ...”

“... she married Roger Bradshaigh, the son of a baronet. The couple took on his family estate of Haigh Hall near Wigan in 1742 and drew a comfortable income from its coal reserves; they remained childless but were busy and happy managing Haigh, and visiting her brother-in-law the Earl of Derby near Liverpool. She heartily disapproved of too much learning in women ...”

“... me Waiting in the Wings, Noël Coward’s play about a theatrical retirement home – Denville Hall, I suppose it is. He wants me to update it, though lest I should think this kind of thing beneath me what he says he wants is ‘a new perspective on the play’.The perspective will have to be a pretty distant one as it now seems a creaking piece all ...”

“... off here and there the note of each species, as if he had been a child left alone in a concert hall with the deserted instruments of a full orchestra. Finding a sealion snoring on the bank of its pool, he rippled the water suddenly. He was a quarter of a mile away when he heard the responding bark.In this vision of an animal meeting neighbours he has never ...”

“... party. He describes these years at the GLC amusingly and, so far as one can tell, frankly. County Hall, the council’s South Bank headquarters, had luxuries that surpassed the palace just over the river. When Livingstone arrived there in 1973, chairs of committees had ‘personal assistants, typists, chauffeur-driven cars, constantly restocked drinks ...”

“... as the guests were leaving the table for coffee, they spotted Rossellini, tiptoeing through the hall. He went straight to bed. Miss Bergman, desperate, tried to get him to come downstairs. ‘Tell them I didn’t come home,’ he suggested unhelpfully. She was left to return to the living-room to make impossible excuses, when suddenly the double doors were ...”

“... landscape at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. I should be out there now. I have been brooding on Peter Ackroyd’s notion that the Thames is a river like the Ganges or the Jordan, a place of pilgrimage, a source of spiritual renewal. ‘The river itself becomes a tremulous deity,’ he asserts. I carried Ackroyd’s epic, Thames: Sacred River, as I made a ...”

“... the other teachers. We had our dinner in a Nissen hut in those days. They called it ‘the dining hall’, as if we were dukes. At the end was a partition, and behind it the teachers ate. Not the nuns – they went home to their own dinner in the convent – but Mrs Parker and Mrs Bacup, and Miss Dowd who taught the babies’ class. In privacy, they set into ...”

“... Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where, unknown to him, his high-life associate, the film-maker Peter Whitehead, had been taken, after suffering a heart attack. It was one of those mornings of indulgent sunshine, filtered through gauze. Lilies and bell-shaped purple flowers. Twigs. A long pine table which gave Marks plenty of elbow room to roll his herbal ...”

“... a decision to deny them asylum. But even the social security advisory committee set up by Peter Lilley doubted his claim that this would constitute a saving of £200 million. It also warned that ‘extreme hardship’ was likely to result from the legislation. The proposals nonetheless took effect from February. Last month, the Court of Appeal ruled ...”

“... be.On a Monday in late August 1956, somewhere around two hundred of us waited in the assembly hall of Dunfermline High School, wondering what would come next. We had stood to sing the day’s hymn and sat bent to mutter the Lord’s Prayer – the Scottish version, debts and debtors rather than the sibilant trespasses and trespass – and then watched as ...”

“... with its ectoplasmic T-shirts and made straight for the auditorium – or was it Valhalla, the hall of the slain?The auditorium had an emptiness that could speak to us all. One shouldn’t really, in this context, use the phrase ‘warm-up act’, but there he was in a loud shirt, Rob Green from Nottingham. He played a guitar and had enough spontaneous ...”

“... Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda is a tall story, as elaborate and fantastical as any of the yarns spun by the trickster hero of his last novel Illywhacker. For one thing, it’s a family history, and we’re all of us secretly stunned by the coincidences which have resulted, against the odds, in our existence. And the narrator’s account of his great-grandfather, the Reverend Oscar Hopkins, is, by any standards, a weird one ...”