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“... of the child behind the man, Mandelson’s short-trousered induction into political life. Boy Peter on a Hovis bicycle! That was the madeleine moment in an interminable chronicle of not-saying, arcane rituals of grazing and trouser-changing unmatched since Roberto Rossellini made The Taking by Power by Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an ...”

“... look-out for police. It was clearly all very different from life in the bright, bony students’ hall of residence such as he would have occupied nowadays. Most of the students Todd met had right-wing sympathies, but not extreme. Most of them sympathised with the democratic National Party, and the National Socialist Party began to win their allegiance only ...”

“... two decades earlier, like him looked eagerly for books in the Lavender Hill library, saw Music Hall (Little Tich and George Robey to his Kate Carney) at the Grand Theatre, Clapham Junction, in adolescence ate sometimes at Maggie Brown’s eel and pie shop in the High Street. But this account of growing up is written with such elegance and dulcet charm that ...”

“... cartoonist for their originals? That may only mean that the bite has gone out of it all. Yet Peter Cook, one of the early impersonators, is quoted here as saying : ‘My impersonation of Macmillan was in fact extremely affectionate – I was a great Macmillan fan.’ On the printed evidence, he could have fooled us. Did he fool us? It is useful to have ...”

“... of work upon others. There are no horses wild enough to have dragged me to the recent Albert Hall nostalgia night, at which the Americans Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and our own less charismatic survivors of the Sixties’ Beat generation, all read examples of their sloppy, mindless ersatz poetry. I have been content merely to enjoy the differing ...”

“... by warders and barbed wire, and a life-sized doll hanging from a chandelier. In the entrance hall, rows of prosthetic eyeballs are fixed to the wall. The agents opened the door with a crowbar and, according to federal prosecutors who spoke to the New York Times, ‘seized photographs of nude underage girls’. Evidence has been piling up that Epstein was ...”

“... surface. An enormous dried sunflower is attached, inverted, in the centre of the canvas. Peter Schjeldahl saw an ‘energetic contradiction of the frontal and the recessive’ in these works, which he compares to the paintings of Jackson Pollock. He refers to the sense of being caught between diving into the image, drawn into the perspectival ...”

“... from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered Peter Arne (in a blizzard of newsprint dots), Charles Hawtrey having a very bad hair day after a house fire in Deal. Seabrook loves the reforgotten, the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be acknowledged in The Oxford Companion to English Literature ...”

“... meeting’. Every morning doctors, nurses, patients and their families would assemble in a hall filled with makeshift rows of chairs where, in a thick haze of cigarette smoke, the administration of the hospital was thrashed out by means of a clamorous direct democracy. Foot is alert to the ways in which the archive photos of the general meetings ...”

“... as an agent in the mid-1950s, representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with ...”

“... tells much the same story as that given by Elisabeth Murray (Caught in the Web of Words, 1977) and Peter Sutcliffe (in his 1978 ‘informal history’ of OUP), from their biographical and house-historical perspectives. Willinsky’s Murray, however, is less the innocent gnome in his funny hat in the scriptorium at the bottom of the garden in the Banbury ...”

“... Azzam has a ‘golf training room’. The late Omani sultan’s 155-metre Al Said has a concert hall with room for a fifty-piece orchestra. Sheikh Muhammad al-Maktoum’s eponymous Dubai (162 metres) accommodates a disco and a squash court. At 134 metres, Serene, the yacht owned by the Saudi enfant terrible, Mohammed bin Salman, is only the 24th largest in ...”

“... to England. These incomers didn’t go on to develop much affection for their adopted country. Peter of Savoy bequeathed the huge estates he had acquired to his relatives back in Savoy and his palace on the Strand (where the Savoy Hotel now stands) to the prior of the hospice on the Grand St Bernard Pass. Matthew Paris lamented that ‘the English nobility ...”

“... deal, shares rose again to £4.50 each; Edwards sold £3.7 million shares, making £16.6 million. Peter Reid, the ex-Everton midfielder and manager – and as Sunderland manager, the subject of the BBC fly-on-the-wall docu-tragedy of the club’s relegation, Premier Passions – stands to make hundreds of thousands of pounds should he wish to cash in on his ...”

“... wife. ‘Now we shall never know.’ The regular scenario for many of Barry’s jokes concerned St Peter at the gates of Heaven, so that when he finally arrived there last month it can have been no surprise.24 February. One doubtful blessing of my new and sophisticated hearing aids is that I can hear every rumble and gurgle of my stomach as well as the ...”