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“... in that too. He found that he shared his interest in dirty books with ‘the sensitive and worldly-wise’ Robert Conquest and together they went on expeditions, trawling the specialist shops for their respective bag in a partnership that seems both carefree and innocent. Unusual, too, as I had always thought that porn, looking for it and looking at it, was ...”

“... of Corfu. There are several different versions of Mosley’s political career. Fellow politicians, Michael Foot and Richard Crossman among them, took the view that, like themselves, he was interested in power but that, unlike them, unlike Foot and Crossman at any rate, he was too impatient to wait his turn. For Skidelsky, though there are signs that he may now ...”

“... political theme, sees the writer as doing a ‘particularly brilliant thing’ in Amphitryon; and Michael Cordner three times reiterates the word ‘masterpiece’ when introducing his edition of the play. There is an appealing American proverb, ‘If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ It seems to throw light on the difficult case of Dryden. During ...”

“... started a new album, ‘EGYPT’. On the first page, a collage of stamps of King Farouk, who, like Michael of Romania, was a boy at his accession. The stamps are the first issue of his reign, designed in 1937. Later in the album we find the revised design of 1944, by which time Farouk was 24 and wearing a manly moustache on his rather pudgy face. The Farouk ...”

“... for languages or football: because it’s beautiful. I have no idea what stars were rising when Michael Wood’s The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles pushed onto the planet’s surface, but so brainy a book must have a lot of air signs in its chart. It seems at first to have been born under the sign of Aquarius: analytical, determinedly ...”

“... some of the medical history that was being published in the Eighties, particularly by Roy Porter. Michael Neve and Jonathan Miller separately suggested that the madness of George III would make a play, and Neve lent me The Royal Malady by Charles Chenevix Trench, which is still the best account of the King’s illness and the so-called Regency Crisis. I also ...”

“... qualified they are to identify suspects in need of psychiatric help. The Crown Court study by Michael Zander and Paul Henderson was of value precisely because it gave us the opinions of all the principal participants in all the cases which went through the Crown Court within the period of the study; if, as some people have argued, the right inference to ...”

“... get his work done. Not “I can’t eat!”, but “I can’t work!” that was the burden of all wise complaining among men.’ One wonders what Carlyle might have had to say to Irena Knowlton, wife of a small shoe manufacturer in Hamilton, Massachusetts. Besides caring for three children, feeding boarders, doing the housework and garden work and keeping ...”

“... story itself. You’d do well to snap your pencil and walk away at that point. Exhaustion can be a wise counsellor. But sometimes the second story not only stands up but takes to running: it comes after you, and even in your sleep you meet these pieces that won’t fit together, voices and minutes and partial truths hanging around on their own. These fragments ...”

“... instalments, but it didn’t matter: I read and reread the piece that summer. Sharply written by Michael Watts, it covered the aftermath of the Pistols’ split at the end of a disastrous American tour; the fitful struggle to make a Sex Pistols movie; McLaren’s dalliance with managing the Slits; the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen, holed up with Sid ...”

“... as I feel for you this afternoon! Why, my interest in Ixion’s wife Dia, on whom I begot the wise Peirithous, was nothing by comparison; and this also applies to Danaë, daughter of Acrisius, the girl with the beautiful ankles, on whom I begot the hero Perseus … Why, I would venture to say, dearest wife, that I have never yet conceived so delirious a ...”

“... about the Raphaels he had been seeing in Rome: There was in him none but the very smallest Michael Angelesque elements – I fancy that I have found after much fumbling & worrying … the secret of his incontestable thinness & weakness. He was incapable of energy of statement … this energy – positiveness – call it what you will – is a simple ...”

“... Richardson had insisted they were innocent and had been framed by the police. I recalled that Sir Michael Havers, who led for the Crown in the 1975 trial, had reasoned to the jury that if the Four were innocent, a huge conspiracy to pervert the course of justice must have taken place. Where did this leave Havers’s conspiracy? Had the Court of Appeal ...”

“... was appointed to steer the town through its impending ordeal. One of the first measures the seven wise men settled on was a bulldozing programme, to destroy as many Albanian homes and enterprises as possible in the old part of the town. It managed about forty houses and ten shops before more urgent matters arose. Ibrahim Bejtullahu had a large cosmetics shop ...”

“... could write wonderful prose, who had a sense of politics and the destiny of his people, who was wise and smart, who was from Harlem but had developed other perspectives, and whose first novel, in its treatment of religion and a Harlem only barely understood south of 125th Street, was compared to William James and William Faulkner. In Paris in 1950 Baldwin ...”