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“... Sir, The quicker Richard Branson sells Virgin Railways and moves on the better. The last two occasions my wife has had the misfortune to use his wretched railway she has been 60 minutes and 110 minutes late. We are sick and tired of his artificial smile (it reminds us of Mr Blair’s) and his publicity forever in the press and on television ...”

“... she and her handlers have been fashioning since the debacle of the 2008 primaries, or so Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes argue in HRC, their inside-dopester account of Clinton’s ‘rebirth’. Allen and Parnes serve as a chorus, commenting portentously on the events described in Hard Choices. Together the two books ...”

“... has played with the idea that they were pantomime villains, a bit of a joke. ‘More Woody Allen than John Le Carré,’ the Sunday Times said, while nevertheless doing its best to turn its report into the raciest of spy stories, presenting a sexed-up version of the 55-page charge sheet released by the FBI – the only actual information anyone really ...”

“... its bibliophile vice-president, Gordon Ray) acquired the literary correspondence of the publisher Richard Bentley and Sons, principal purveyor of the three-decker novel to the Victorian reading public. At the same time, the British Library (with financial assistance from the Friends of National Libraries) took possession of most of Bentley’s ledgers and ...”

“... and Kinship in East London, was read by most people in the Pelican edition). He became a member of Allen Lane’s brains trust. Hoggart turned to the publisher for funding when he was setting up the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) a few years later. Lane had to be persuaded by his senior adviser W.E. Williams, whose influence at ...”

“... comedy, in the national tour of the revue Make Mine Manhattan. Back then, the radio comedian Fred Allen joked, television was called ‘a medium because anything well done is rare’. Although Allen excepted Caesar, he was on the money about TV and the blandness of the America it reflected back to its distracted ...”

“... the future.’ Others remind you that the dystopian world has its pleasures. On the page facing Allen Jones’s Archway (a sculpture in the Heathrow Hilton, Ballard’s favourite London building), you read that ‘sitting in its atrium one becomes, briefly, a more advanced kind of human being. Within this remarkable building one could never fall in love, or ...”

“... and elegant. He hated the pages of black sans serif type, punctuated with illustrations, which Richard Hollis – working with Berger and others – had produced.Beatrice Warde, advocating the kind of tailored designs which Tschichold (briefly, but brilliantly) and Schmoller produced at Penguin, said that a book, like a wine glass, should not draw ...”

“... down in the light of broad day. His assassin was murdered on camera while in maximum security. Richard Nixon’s intimates fed high-denomination dollar bills into a shredder in order to disguise their provenance in the empire of – Howard Hughes? Marilyn Monroe fucked both Kennedy brothers before taking her own life, if she did indeed take it. Frank ...”

“... County lists and herbarium sheets were searched for older records. One lesson of David Elliston Allen’s earlier book The Naturalist in Britain was that this kind of disciplined collaboration can get good scientific work out of the essentially inefficient engine of amateur natural history. There is more than one reason for climbing such Everests of ...”

“... in some ways rather proper, had a taste for the risqué: his literary adviser in the early days, Richard Le Gallienne, poetaster, philanderer and drinker, had an instinct for the mood of the times. The Bodley Head rapidly became a succès de scandale as well as modestly profitable for some years. Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Ricketts were among the ...”

“... In​ 1948 Allan Wingate published British Pamphleteers, a collection of tracts assembled by Richard Reynolds and introduced by George Orwell. The first pamphlet in the book is John Knox’s First Blast of the Trumpet (1558), which begins: ‘To promote a woman to beare rule, superioritie, dominion or empire above any realme, nation, or citie, is repugnant to nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his reveled will and approved ordinance, and finallie it is the subversion of good order, of all equitie and justice ...”

“... Karl Marx, Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, the Nashville Agrarians and their latterday apostles, Richard Weaver and Melvin Bradford. Liberals thus find themselves confronting a shrewd scholar who denies them the luxury of easy retort – he lashes out from both right and left to rough up the bourgeois middle. What can one do with a once-loyal Marxist who ...”

“... and practice of liberal democracy, was intended, in the words of the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, to fulfil ‘the task of saving Europe for Western civilisation’. The reconstruction effort was driven by a growing fear that, without it, the Germans would become susceptible to Communist or neo-Nazi propaganda. The doctrine of collective guilt ...”

“... their home airfield when the undercarriage gave way on landing. When the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richard talks dismissively about ‘Brabazon bands’ he is alluding to an ill-fated post-war British airliner. A rock band can be beautiful to look at, sound as sleek and smooth as you like, the gnarled Richard is saying, but ...”