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“... of an otherwise serious artist earning enduring notoriety for the stupidest thing they ever did. Alec Guinness was embarrassed by his turn in Star Wars; Luciano Pavarotti is popularly identified with his smarmy easy-listening trio. Sometimes I fear that Elmore Leonard, the American crime writer with more than forty novels to his name, will end up being most ...”

“... you weren’t ruthless enough.’ When Eden offered him the Exchequer, Macmillan did a Gordon Brown: insisting that ‘as chancellor, I must be undisputed head of the home front, under you’ and that there could be no question of his predecessor, Butler, being accorded the title of deputy prime minister. Barely a year later, after the Suez debacle, he ...”

“... a cello, an ‘unbridled oboe’, or, most spectacularly, ‘a trumpet muffled with silk’ (Alec Guinness), had not been recognised by a person who was in court on some other, unrelated business. If all this indeed happened at the height of a homophobic witch-hunt, the actor seems to have got off easily with a small fine and a routine scolding. It was ...”

“... against the expulsion. Why did an overwhelming majority of current or former residents in Uganda, brown or black, feel this way?The answer, I learned, is that what happened in 1972 was the culmination of a process that had started a few years earlier, when many Ugandan Asians were disenfranchised both by British and Ugandan law. At that time, they had been a ...”

“... finds himself recounting, in the first person, Hardy’s memory of watching the hanging of Martha Brown at Dorchester when he was an adolescent. Cross-examination reveals that he does indeed have all of Hardy’s consciousness in his head, and that he was born exactly a hundred years after Hardy, to the very minute. Sharon thinks all this will be good for ...”

“... seat out of Labour’s grip. The defeat, according to a contemporary Nationalist observer, Oliver Brown, sent a shiver along the Labour benches ‘looking for a spine to run up’. The Scottish Labour vote was managed at this point by Willie Ross, who was secretary of state for Scotland between 1964 and 1970, and again from 1974 until the retirement of his ...”

“... women as both objects and victims of male sexual desire. Instead of the servus callidus, the smart-alec slave, we get a new stereotype: the bona meretrix, the hooker with a heart of gold. The female characters in Terence – including prostitutes and even mothers and mothers-in-law – are almost all nice, admirable, thoughtful, victimised people. The men ...”

“... Yahoo (though not Apple) belong to the conservative anti-environmental political action committee Alec (the American Legislative Exchange Council). The story Silicon Valley less often tells about itself has to do with dollar signs and weapons systems. The industry came out of military contracting, and its alliance with the Pentagon has never ended. The ...”

“... skill, accenting and phrasing even the most trivial script in order to get the rhythm right. And Alec Guinness would work on a text for weeks, walking round the garden listening to the tape and saying the words out loud. 3 May. Lord Browne disgraced largely thanks to the Mail on Sunday and the bribery of a Canadian youth. The newspapers painstakingly explain ...”

“... for Wilson’s delay in devaluing the pound. His sense of social detail is acute, as he reports Alec Douglas-Home’s doomed attempts to be trendy (he announced in a 1964 election speech that his party ‘is delivering the goods and it goes places and it will never, I promise you, get stuck in the mud’) and reveals that Edward Heath was probably the first ...”

“... all ablaze these last few weeks and months. Bella Caledonia, Wee Ginger Dug, Rev. Stuart Campbell, Alec Finlay, Wheelie Bins for Yes – a cataract of stuff. God knows, in my hours online I wandered down some peculiar byways (the Spectator comments pages). The Better Together ‘Patronising Lady’ advert kept us entertained for ages. (Watch the ‘Valium ...”

“... wooziness, to be all about values and community and wholeness: in a word, Christian socialism and brown bread. Now listen to Williams on ‘Problems of the Coming Period’, originally a talk given just before the 1983 Election. Thatcher, he argues, has not really achieved an intellectual hegemony. If you take the percentage of people who are going to vote ...”

“... Immaculately dressed in a jacket and scarf and his famous white trousers, always carrying a small brown suitcase, Bender charms, bullshits and blags his way across the USSR, refusing to play by the rules. Arriving in a provincial town he persuades the locals he is a chess grandmaster who will make their town the chess capital of the world, then the capital of ...”

“... he made a presentation in Washington DC at a meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). ALEC is an influence forum, where state politicians and corporate businessmen mull things over to their mutual advantage. The ALEC taskforce event at which Pearce sketched out his ...”

“... successor to the old Etonian Harold Macmillan, chose between two other Etonians, Lord Hailsham and Alec Douglas-Home. How had this happened? Much worse was to come. Cameron tossed the rotten bouquet of a referendum to the nation. Seemingly, it was done lightly – politics as one of his careless posh parties. On the eve of Brexit, here was Boris ...”