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“... but it spread like a rash of entitlement to the North.Phil Oakey, from Sheffield, was a hospital porter; he lived for alienation, the post-industrial, David Bowie, and having a show-stopping haircut. He was the singer in the Human League. His hair was long on one side, covering the entire right half of his face, and short on the other. He ‘had the perfect ...”

“... And what am I now?’ That is almost exactly like Natasha’s exclamation at the death of Prince Andrew, which the translators weaken by paraphrase, finding its literalness too disconcerting. It should be: ‘Where is he and who is he now?’ Who is he now? Tolstoy’s sense of identity was so strong that it would obviously survive death. But because so ...”

“... a scale that would have gladdened the ruralist heart of a Richard Jefferies. Five years ago, Roy Porter still diagnosed ‘a downward spiral of infrastructural and human problems that will prove hard to halt’. Yet now, when London has slipped way down the table of city-sizes and tours round the eerie magnificence of the Foreign Office induce a Venetian ...”

“... line which is likely to be most popular with Africans,’ the influential colonial civil servant Andrew Cohen wrote in 1951. ‘It is also our business to do what we believe is in the genuine interests of Africans.’ It went almost without saying that Africans were incapable of working this out for themselves. The charitable way of putting it was to say ...”

“... the end of a hallway lined with untidy stacks of case notes in wrinkled cardboard folders Martyn Porter, a senior surgeon and the hospital’s clinical chairman, waited in his office to be called to the operating theatre. He fixed me with an intense, tired, humorous gaze. ‘The problem with politicians is they can’t be honest,’ he said. ‘If they ...”

“... itself. The admission of rival sentiments comes to appear merely a nuance of the mind’s habit. Andrew Motion’s way of making sense is to imagine something, then something else apparently quite different, and let the poem accommodate both imaginings with or without specifying the relation between them. A girl and her father, quarrelling; the girl and a ...”

“... denounce the sentimental are generally unaware of what sentiment is’. The paintings of Fairfield Porter, traditional, carried out in the teeth of Abstract Expressionism, are subjected to a stern interrogation, during which any number of flaws are stigmatised (like Porter’s difficulty with faces) before Updike can allow ...”

“... extraordinary: you can almost hear the North Country voices bickering over churchwarden pipes and porter in their private discussion groups. Secord is equally persuasive about the importance of regional institutions in the reception of ideas. Every industrial centre had its equivalent of the Halifax Mechanics’ Institution, where the aspiring thinker might ...”

“... makes it to Milan, a little boy runs out and fetches him a bottle of grappa. ‘I sent for the porter and when he came I told him in Italian to get me a bottle of Cinzano at the wine shop, a fiasco of chianti and the evening papers.’ Once he’s up and ready to start courting Catherine Barkley in the style she deserves, they’re off to their favourite ...”

“... In the same volume there is a fierce essay by Timothy Buck on the insufficiencies of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by John Woods. The failings are apparently mostly lexical and syntactical: ‘Knopf have once again employed a translator whose knowledge of German ...”

“... Meriel McCooey, both aficionados of Hollywood musicals, could be heard breaking into duets of Cole Porter or Noël Coward – Meriel in tune, Francis undoubtedly faultless with the lyrics. At six o’clock a half-bottle of Teachers would be purchased for ‘pre-drink drinks’ – a deadline gradually pulled forward to 5.30. You would hear, at ...”

“... to sober eyes. But there would be a real liberation in it too. If we wanted to refer to Cole Porter or Philip Marlowe or Lassie, we could do it without being suspected of trying for the popular touch; if we came across Thomas Aquinas, we wouldn’t have to pretend we found the thought in an old cookbook. This may sound utopian (or nightmarish: chacun son ...”

“... longer needed to modify Welles’s ‘genius’: Citizen Kane changed the course of film and, as Andrew Sarris put it, infected American cinema with the ‘virus of artistic aspiration’. Not only a brilliant, innovative picture, it dramatised – in a way no previous movie had done – the act of film-making itself. And then, after the studio butchering of ...”

“... owner of Rugarth Investment Trust, which gave £268,099 to the Tories in 1986-8); and Sir Eric Porter (chief executive of Trafalgar House, which gave £460,000 to the Tories during the Thatcher years). The privatised industries have also been keen supporters of the party. Thames Water has taken the direct approach, reportedly giving the Tories £50,000 ...”

“... in Glasgow and berated the chief constable for having him followed. William Klare was a kitchen porter masquerading as a dentist who lived off his partner’s earnings as a prostitute. Paul Buckwaldt adopted the alias ‘Sherlock Holmes’. And Karl Hentschel – ‘such a nuisance’ in Steinhauer’s view – repeatedly blackmailed the German Secret ...”