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“... notice). The following day, part of the text of a pompous letter from the Solicitor-General, Sir Patrick Mayhew, to Heseltine informing him that he had made a few trivial mistakes in a letter he had written on the Westlands business to Lloyds Bank, was mysteriously leaked to the newspapers. Two days later, on 8 January, Sir Raymond Lygo, chief executive of ...”

“... targeting data, often by paying huge sums of cash, from sources within rebel militias. A former White House adviser on Russian affairs told me that before 9/11 Putin ‘used to say to us: “We have the same nightmares about different places.” He was referring to his problems with the caliphate in Chechnya and our early issues with al-Qaida. These ...”

“... is an autochthonous bigot who once organised a mock-mass on the platform of the Ulster Hall. Patrick Marrinan, his biographer, describes the sinister shabbiness of this occasion, the nervous fascination of the audience laughing at a renegade Spanish priest reciting unfamiliar Latin words, the canny showmanship, the plastic buckets brimming with ...”

“... his first novel to its conclusion. The river was still, as though gathering to itself the white and orange beams of the street lamps which were reflected in its darkness . . . Spenser Spender was filled with a sensation of lightness, as though his own body were moving out, too, across the water, implicated in the lives of these human beings who ...”

“... necessary’ and an attempt to prove that all ‘black’ people were naturally inferior to the ‘white race’.*It is ironic, therefore, that Long is our main source about Francis Williams, who in his lifetime (he died in 1762) had been the most famous Black person in the world, at least among educated English-speaking people. He was rich; he was a ...”

“... disowning his own parent, searches for another father. Portrait of John Stanislaus Joyce by Patrick Tuohy (1923) Just as Oscar Wilde began to become himself the year after his father’s death, when he was 21, and John Butler Yeats managed, figuratively, to kill his son by going into exile in 1907, so too James Joyce managed to kill his father when in ...”

“... likes photography, but not fashion photography.’ Robin Muir, the curator, and the set designer, Patrick Kinmonth, have no doubt done their best but the Portrait Gallery is an awkward space. From the main corridor and the rooms that usually host the modern part of the NPG’s collection, they’ve created 15 chamberlets, sprouting from two ...”

“... solid, mischievous’; Charles Swann, ‘wheezing with his awful respiration’; Patrick Parrinder, ‘silent, smiling, ironic’, the best-dressed of the party; Tariq Ali with ‘lustrous brown eyes’ but (Inglis claims) ‘a bit out of it all’. As a narrative device it is brilliant, setting the scene for what is to be a bleak ...”

“... from empire – and one that strengthens Zhirinovsky’s hand. Lieven quotes General Denikin, the White commander in the Russian Civil War, writing after the victory of the Bolsheviks: ‘The state link of Russia with her borderlands was restored, either voluntarily or through compulsion – economic war or an army offensive. And that would have been chosen ...”

“... of scarlet in evidence, in the robes of the assembled Council and of sundry invited academics, white in the vestments of the local clergy, and a respectable quantity of gold in the mayoral chains of office; there are any number of sombre grey suits on visiting diplomats and corporate sponsors; and outside the sunshine, if there is any, glints from the ...”

“... They should stop fishwives throwing the guts of mackerel carelessly away, perhaps to besmirch the white silk stockings of a foreigner who would then conceive a very bad opinion of law and order in Britain. This man was serious, and so was a critic who, ridiculing the idea that the appearance of Macheath on stage was a chief cause of crime, offered to reveal ...”

“... a non-urgent urgency. What happens happens: shaped word clusters frolicking between generous white margins. Speed-reading is the preferred option, but speed-reading in slow motion. In Lion Lion there is even a poem called ‘The "Speed” Novel’. but you should take those layers off so it can be just imagination – the ‘speed’ novel discussion of ...”

“... through correspondence with people she never met or hadn’t seen for years. (Among them was Patrick O’Brian, another writer in flight from England, who dedicated his fourth Aubrey-Maturin novel, The Mauritius Command, to her.) Otherwise, she had little interest in the literary world. When she encountered a group of writers in Athens in 1962, the poet ...”

“... office workers, and street gangs pretending they are riding with Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Patrick Wright, in Passport to Peking, quotes the Labour politician Morgan Phillips, who visited China as part of a delegation in 1954. ‘As I saw the great mass of cycles on the road I was reminded of a day in Bedford during the last war … The workers were ...”

“... no vice-chancellor enthroned in Convocation waiting to take your voting paper and lift his hat as Patrick Neill tipped his twenty years ago. Now Neill is himself a candidate in what feels more like a local council election, with trestle tables, ushers and the proctors taking the votes. One of Tom Bingham’s proposers, I vote for him and no one else, the ...”