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“... doing well’. Birt agreed, with consequences for the BBC as a whole. But it is also clear from Richard Lindley’s long, densely researched history of Panorama that the programme’s perceived importance over the past fifty years has been generated as much by its own staff, with their professional egos and particular working practices, as by outside ...”

“... operate differently. Back at base there’s a lot of desk work, even if the buildings are nice. In Britain the diplomatic service was once a professional caste of imperial administrators, and had to be reinvented for a nation without an empire. Most of what was lost won’t be missed – the ubiquitous racism, for instance – but there are ...”

“... large numbers of leading intellectuals, from, say, Herbert Spencer through H.G. Wells and on to Richard Hoggart and beyond, exhibited no such consanguinity.However, even if many of the more sweeping generalisations about the social homogeneity of intellectuals in Britain prove on closer inspection to be false, it remains true that some families do appear to ...”

“... to Jack Yeats: My last year’s colleague … is still in Dublin for a little while. He’s a nice fellow the nephew of Cissie Sinclair [who had been a painter] … It would be a charity to ask him round one afternoon and show him a few pictures and drop all the conversational bombs you have handy without pretending anything. But the luck will be all on ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... but with the most supportive possible spouse. In her autobiography Williams is conspicuously nice about Thatcher, recalling that after her first ministerial question time she went into the Lady Members’ room to find Thatcher ironing a dress and was congratulated on her performance: ‘After all,’ the Ironing Lady told Williams, ‘we can’t let them ...”

“... recognise him at first. ‘It was not the image of Paul . . . that I saw, but in his place a very nice, pale, gentle, middle-aged man – fat yet fragile – dressed in a canopy of light blue, with this thick cane.’ Nice, fat, fragile. I quote this description because this is the Brando we have mostly seen on screen since ...”

“... that they’re growing. I think that they’re desperate.’ I heard about hope. I heard General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, say: ‘I came away more positive than I’ve ever been. I think we’re getting some momentum built up.’ I heard about happiness. I heard Lieutenant General James Mattis say that ‘it’s a lot of fun to ...”

“... over all the drawers in the work table in the spare room. Blakey rolls her eyes, sits down, pulls Richard Rorty out of her bag and prepares to wait for several hours.I guess I left this part out earlier: that I’m as ‘arty’ as my old mum. Can’t help it: it’s a mutant gene, like homosexuality. And though I can neither draw nor paint I’m fairly good ...”

“... through the battlefield: from early years with Rex Ingram at the Victorine Studios in Nice, stills photography, quota quickies as a director in London, the unwelcome coming of sound, the breakthrough engagement with Korda and the meeting with Pressburger. He has a bewildering recall of facts and names which makes the randomness of the index all ...”

“... talked to anyone in the past week or so who doesn’t believe that this was and is true of Richard Gott. I don’t say this with any sense or intention of accommodating to the prevailing wind, since Gott has disliked me intensely for more than twenty years and last January wrote a loopy letter to this journal, blaming James Fenton and myself for once ...”

“... Alexander Hitchens to Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone, both of whom were very nice to him, as was Jessica Lange and as were Uma Thurman and Oprah Winfrey. His only autograph refusal came from Jane Fonda. I was impressed by how many people didn’t go for Gump. Usually, success is everything and brings everything in its train, but the idea ...”

“... up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect on the germ of truth that lurks in each conceited anecdote. Of the White House staffers who did not trust him and with whom he wants to settle accounts, the most prominent two – Chief of Staff Harold Ickes and ...”

“... results, I told him proudly, in the partition calculus he’d invented with his fellow Hungarian Richard Rado; I was also trying to settle a conjecture in infinite combinatorics – that there was no infinite descending sequence of countable order types. He ignored the first, questioned me about the second, thought for a few mom ents, then shrugged – which ...”

“... educated outside the normal rut at Dartington, and then, after a spell at Gray’s Inn, by Richard Titmuss at the LSE, free therefore of the resentment, deference, fantasy and fear which drive a large part of the rest of the profession, he has an innocent energy in the face of what he once called ‘the chipped white cups of Dover’ which has carried ...”