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“... lemon Rolls, the infallible bisection of his hair. As soon as the trial got under way at the Old Bailey in May 1918, Billing attracted the support of the Christian Scientists, who believed him to be ‘the Saviour, Christ the King, come to redeem them in this moment of national peril’. Concerned that he would not be able to continue his work if ...”

“... is gossipy, anecdotal. It’s like eavesdropping in the snug of some public-house adjacent to the Bailey, when the gents in the greasy raincoats sit down with a coven of bent briefs. Morton, a former solicitor, has filleted his sources with a notable absence of fuss. He is not embarrassed at recycling large chunks of his Nipper Read ...”

“... Life. Ford called on him for a pair of late films. In Two Rode Together, Stewart and his co-star, Richard Widmark, are lost to their better qualities, lazy, loud-voiced, working from an undernourished script, with the stupefied strut of the American male who has inherited the world in 1961. Soon after, to brilliant and opposite effect, in The Man Who Shot ...”

“... high to hear. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference. Unless you were listening to Cliff Richard or attending Billy Graham’s hallelujah meetings, the Sixties (not the decade, but that period from 1965 to 1972ish) were irresistible. They have been the good fortune and the curse of my generation (‘May you live through interesting times’): we ...”

“... they had priced the book not at 30 guineas but at 3s. 6d. When the case came finally to the Old Bailey the leader for the Crown made the implication explicit by a suggestion that was precise if also notably inept even in a prosecution that was conducted with remarkable ineffectiveness. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, he proposed, was not a book that any upright ...”

“... yet ‘accessible’ (Collins again). Or to quote the photographer David Bailey: ‘She’s the kind of girl you wished lived next door, but she’s never going to.’ Many of these descriptions – perfect yet imperfect, unobtainable yet accessible – relate to a distinction often made with respect to oil painting but almost never ...”

“... generation that did National Service, just too young to have fought in the Second World War. David Bailey once said that ‘Swinging London’ was ‘just national servicemen gone demob happy’. They were radical materialists who believed exclusively in what they could see and what their imaginations delivered them. Transcendence was not on the ...”

“... Westwood – faced criminal charges. The performance was a publicity stunt devised by McLaren and Richard Branson to promote the band’s new single. The Silver Jubilee’s real radical was the Black activist Darcus Howe, born in Trinidad in 1943. As Howe knew, the monarchy wasn’t just a symbol of empire but was actually built on the proceeds of slavery. In ...”

“... in Darling, before Julie Christie came along. She danced on Ready Steady Go!, modelled for David Bailey, introduced Bob Dylan to London, broke Peter Blake’s heart, was part-owner of a frock shop in Carnaby Street, married and gave birth to a daughter all before dying in 1966 at the age of 28. Her story was remembered but her pictures weren’t: most ...”

“... to be found mainly among the professional middle classes, that ran through the Forties’. Yet Richard Acland, figurehead of the Party, had been a Liberal MP before the war, and Common Wealth might be placed on the far left wing of that broad informal alliance of reformers which produced what Addison calls ‘Forties collectivism: the belief in the ...”

“... interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the potent ...”

“... and displace. His real hero was CIA director Casey, who suffered from what his predecessor Richard Helms called Fingerspitzengefühl – ‘a feel for the clandestine’. North reports: ‘I knew nothing of covert operations when I came to the National Security Council but Casey taught me a great deal.’ From 1983 onwards (whatever their part in the ...”

“... There is, as Richard Graves points out, no general biography of Housman. The books about him by Laurence Housman, Grant Richards and Percy Withers are valuable, because these men knew Housman and could describe him: but they are not biographies. George Watson’s A.E. Housman: A Divided Life is more like one, but it is not quite one; of Norman Marlow and Maude Hawkins I say nothing ...”

“... Everyone​  knows that Mervyn Griffith-Jones QC asked an Old Bailey jury in 1960 whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a book they would want their wives or servants to read. The jury – which included three women – is said to have laughed. Its acquittal of Penguin on a charge of violating the newly minted Obscene Publications Act 1959 is widely regarded as a turning point in the centuries-long persecution of literature and philosophy in the name of morality ...”