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“... and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.The Hobbit was a great success, and its publisher, Stanley Unwin, wanted a sequel. He didn’t ...”

“... is not a matter of public record. It is possible that one of his former research assistants, Andrew Gifford, who is also on the board of Heritage, was the link. Gifford has family and other connections at Fleming Mercantile Investment, which eventually took a stake in Heritage, and he is now at GJW, the government consultancy set up in 1980 in ...”

“... without reservation’. In addition, this is the authorised biography (a task first assigned to Andrew Adonis and then handed on), written with the full collaboration of Jennifer Jenkins. Although Campbell is too intelligent a writer to be content with any kind of hagiography and too well informed about recent British politics not to recognise Jenkins’s ...”

“... hear the arguments debated through TV questioning.’ He also felt it would help level the playing field, since the Tories had more money to spend on advertising and this was free publicity. What he won’t say is that he was desperate, a long way behind in the polls, and willing to roll the dice. Yet that’s where he was. At times his desire to avoid ...”

“... having responsibility for matters that don’t interest him, even though, as his policy architect Andrew Fisher observes, ‘if you’re the leader you have to lead on everything, not just the things you care about.’Corbyn’s reluctance to compromise on political matters can be overstated: political realism led him to jettison his long-held ...”

“... on the north side, some for a family called Secker who seem to live in the manor house across the field, a romantic rambling house that looks unrestored and has oddly in its grounds an ornate seaside-looking Edwardian clock tower.The Windrush tumbles through the weir on this mild winter morning, but the idyll is deceptive as once, at least, the river has seen ...”

“... and writers of opposing tastes in delighted admiration, provided they didn’t look too closely.As Andrew Saint​ has observed, among the first colonisers of the no longer distant Surrey hills were the painters Myles Birket Foster and James Hook. They were in the van of an easeled army. Charles O’Brien, the latest editor of the Surrey volume of The ...”

“... are you still here?’It’s not that they don’t still fish out of Grimsby. One morning I met Andrew Allard, who runs a ten-vessel outfit called Jubilee Fishing from an office in the docks. When he showed me on a map on the wall where his boats were at that moment I got a sense of the big world of the Grimsby fishermen, how unprovincial it had been to ...”

“... in any case part of his attraction. I should add that I do not agree with Vendler’s rejection of Andrew Motion’s historicist view of Keats’s poems, in her review of his biography of Keats (LRB, 16 October 1997), and believe that ‘To Autumn’ is on one level a great political poem which elegises those who were massacred at Peterloo. Among the many ...”

“... first minute of Carmen, Falstaff, Der Rosenkavalier and Wozzeck (operas written within the force field of Wagner’s immense influence and yet, in key respects, resisting it) throws into startling relief the distinctive character of Wagner’s compositional procedures. In a minute of Bizet, Verdi, Strauss or Berg, the rapid release of musical information and ...”

“... by pushing hard on the child abuse angle; when Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, then died, and Prince Andrew failed to account for his friendship with him, it was QAnon gold. In effect crowdsourced, the QAnon narrative broke free of Q’s plodding cryptograms, which still look to Trump to mount a military coup against the government he leads, and moved towards ...”

“... had designed in Hampshire. Here she was surrounded by dogs, kept goats, had a donkey in the field and painted in a style that was vaguely Russian but which only came into its own when she took up needlework. Her needlework pictures are glowing with colour and intricate in texture, medieval in their richness. It was only in the last ten years or so that ...”

“... for grown-ups. The dog and the train alike are media which circumvent that adult and social field of the novel which in some sense the writer couldn’t do, or didn’t want to. Kipling wanted something else. Even the late dog-stories can, for an impartial sympathy, hit a nerve curiously hard and centrally. These late stories are minimal by the side of ...”

“... or balconies; young people were replacing photographs of themselves with the crescent on a red field in Facebook; night after night, television news was reduced to solemn images of Erdogan and Gul, at the head of a phalanx of army commanders, presiding at the funeral of soldiers killed in the south-east, mothers sobbing over their coffins, intercut with ...”

“... six hundred men to the new techniques of counter-revolutionary warfare, and sent them out into the field the previous week.The following evening, in a café in the central square of Santa Cruz, one of these American officers told us that they had heard on their short-wave radio that Guevara had been captured. ‘He has been wounded,’ we were told, ‘and may ...”