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“... norms. This anti-canonical trail-beating throws up a host of names, some of them forgotten: Douglas Goldring, Leslie Welsh, Edward Shanks, J.D. Beresford, Ethel Carnie, Patrick Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not ...”

“... after all. He was not a mere apparatchik, like Denis Healey, or a burnt-out case, like Douglas Jay. He was the revisionists’ guru – our teacher and mentor. We were what we were, in part at any rate, because of him. To watch him sulking in his tent, when the cause being fought over was, in reality, his cause, and when the troops fighting for it ...”

“... in fact, to a much more familiar literary genre: works that seek, from the science of their day, support for preconceived philosophical, religious or political views that range far beyond science itself. Did not Plato draw from the static perfections of geometry to justify the archaic authoritarianism of his Republic? Eighteenth-century divines claimed ...”

“... age of 14 Toomey is seduced by George Russell (better known as AE) in a Dublin hotel, on the very day which is recorded in Ulysses. Meeting Joyce in Paris in 1924, he tells him: ‘Well, you gave George Russell an eternal and unbreakable alibi for that afternoon. But I know and he knows that he was not in the National Library.’ Other celebrities among the ...”

“... pronoun distinguishes the title of Dame Barbara’s autobiography from the title of the film about Douglas Bader, he who lost both legs as a fighter pilot. I supposed at first it was accidental, but in the book, after describing the death of her second husband, who had been badly wounded during the war, she explains: ‘Few people realise that when a man has ...”

“... in 1937, Thompson was often in trouble with the police, spending his high-school graduation day in Louisville jail as part of a six-week sentence for robbery. A contribution to his school magazine railed against ‘security’, eulogising, in tones apparently inspired by Marlon Brando in The Wild One, the ideal of ‘true courage: the kind which enables ...”

“... as a ‘working-class agitator and politician’. On his ennoblement, Marshal of the RAF Lord Douglas of Kirtleside admitted to being ‘a moderate socialist’, which, as his biographer explains, made him ‘a somewhat unusual member of the higher military hierarchy’. There also seems to be much more space devoted to practitioners of ...”

“... at themselves. This may have been true once when there was no apprehension that the Sun might one day Set. But it is not true today. The good ship Britannia is waterlogged in a shark-infested sea. Don’t rock the boat’. I think now, as I thought then, that this was well over the top, even though the play had the bad luck to be screened during the so-called ...”

“... clothes.’ Winston had been cheered by pinched civilians in the streets of London on VE Day; he had been cheered by traumatised Tommies at the Western Front in 1918; now here he was being cheered by starving Germans in the midst of Berlin’s shattered masonry. Could any Hollywood producer, possibly recreate the emotion of this ...”

“... important a subject to be trusted to a woman. The Boxes were unusual but not quite alone in their day. Jill Craigie was making documentaries and Cooke points to a clutch of films from A Taste of Honey to The Belles of St Trinian’s in which women were involved as writers, directors or editors and in which the female characters became noticeably more ...”

“... tolerated. If a pretender to the premiership boasts of having drunk, in his youth, 14 pints in one day, or the current Prime Minister’s son is found paralytic in Leicester Square after downing many pints, it is seen as a manly rite of passage. Beer Street is as wholesomely British as it was in Hogarth’s day (not so Drug ...”

“... dressed like their fathers, in clothes that looked inherited even when purchased just the other day at New & Lingwood. My own background was different. In my last year at the school, I wrote an anti-Thatcher screed in the school magazine, and a journalist from the Sun ambushed me in the street. Where did I live, what did my parents do? I saw his frustration ...”

“... problem. Hollywood profited hugely from the sheikhs and swashbucklers (Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks) whose advances no red-blooded woman could resist, but felt altogether less confident when it came to doing things the other way round. Female desire had in effect been outsourced, first to the vamps – mature women of vaguely Eastern European ...”

“... 65 hours’ and she was left ‘badly torn’. They called the baby Gavin after Gavin Douglas, the Scottish medieval poet and translator of the Aeneid, but neither of them was suited to parenting. Willa’s relationship with her own mother was difficult and she avoided contact with her handicapped brother. As a new parent, she kept a journal in ...”

“... And the seediest of these parson-scribes found a natural home in the Grub Street of the day, an acre or two of foundling newspapers and inky warrens, inhabited, as Dr Johnson had it, ‘by writers of small histories, dictionaries and temporary poems’. Small history has a firm memory of some of these characters, but I doubt if they have ever been ...”