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“... of memorabilia she finds the ultimate Alma Cogan collectors’ item: a recording of Hindley and Ian Brady torturing their fourth victim, Lesley Ann Downey, while Cogan’s Christmas novelty hit ‘The Little Drummer Boy’ plays on Radio Luxembourg in the background. Being famous doesn’t just mean ‘enduring the bizarre projections of others’, Cogan ...”

“... about its audiences, buildings, distributors and publicists as it is about the films themselves. Ian Christie notes in The Last Machine (1994) that until around 1907 people didn’t visit the cinema with the idea of seeing a particular film. Audiences were captivated by the novelty of moving pictures: a baby having breakfast, a train arriving at a station, a ...”

“... of Literacy, though thanks to the tribulations of libel law it wasn’t published until 1957; that Ian Watt was giving final form to the book that became The Rise of the Novel, again published in 1957; and that Raymond Williams was drafting the bulk of what became Culture and Society, submitted to the publisher in 1956, eventually published in 1958. These were ...”

“... implied others a fair share in the drama. Antonio in The Merchant of Venice is presented in Ian Smith’s virtuoso essay ‘Antonio’s White Penis’ as a man dangerously paralleled not only with Shylock but with the black Prince of Morocco, and engaged in a tricky category-trading negotiation to remain within the entitled bracket of whiteness ...”

“... an article by the No-campaigner Robert McCartney, a barrister and UK Unionist MP whom no one in Britain I know has ever heard of. Perhaps that’s because he’s kept the press on their guard with his proven readiness to sue for libel (there was a famous episode in Northern Ireland some years ago involving a chocolate eclair). McCartney states that the ...”

“... contribute to yet another symposium on the state of critical chassis which still persists in Great Britain. The editor enclosed a statement entitled ‘A New Orthodoxy’ which listed certain ‘imperative tasks’. The sixth task was this: ‘To expose the absurdity of using literary criticism as an outlet for political frustrations.’ This paradoxical call ...”

“... a judgment on all English immigration into Ireland, and that his own family would have stayed in Britain if not driven by the same kind of greed.’ There is the irony of this Church’s need to maximise its effortfulness at converting the Catholics while minimising its effectiveness: ‘The notorious fact was that the conversion of the natives could not be ...”

“... service technicians were employed by the NHS. Complicated arrangements like these are the norm in Britain, but they are perennial sources of difficulty for medical schools and the hospitals associated with them. The organisations have different missions and defend their budgets with vigour. Hostility between medical academics and ordinary doctors is also ...”

“... 1970s Johnson was, as Coe’s publishers maintain, ‘one of the best-known young novelists in Britain’, but his celebrity quickly faded. Now, as this large biography attests, there has been a revival of interest. Coe has worked on his book for years, occasionally lamenting the loss of time that might have been devoted to writing fiction, his main ...”

“... the author of Culture and Society, a book which traced the genealogy of the idea of culture in Britain as though the rest of the world hardly existed. Yet he noted that the Godwin circle had carried French Enlightenment ideas into England and that the Pre-Raphaelites had supported the revolutions of 1848 and welcomed political refugees into their ...”

“... Showcased by a long-focus lens that tactfully blurs the background of industrial dereliction. Britain is Working. Handson management. Optimism. Good humour. That stuff. A cross between a hobbled moon walk and Neil Kinnock’s famous tumble on Brighton beach. Here’s the pitch, according to Mr Gibbons. Employment. Plenty of jobs for locals in a depressed ...”

“... really the Tardis, an ineptly camouflaged space-and-time-travel machine. The teachers, Barbara and Ian, will for a while go travelling with the Doctor, too – representing History and Science, the original show’s big themes. ‘An Unearthly Child’ was broadcast on a date to conjure with – 23 November 1963, the day after Kennedy was shot. The basic ...”

“... any plausible defence of progressive politics. This shifts politics, inexorably, to the right. In Britain, during the recent election campaign, the battleground for this newly personalised form of politics was not tax, but defence, immigration, terrorism, security and crime, where all the arguments were played out on Tory territory. In due course, when the ...”

“... to our lawyers on this question: One would think that... the occupation of the Falklands by Great Britain, their development for sheep farming and their use as a whaling-station by British subjects during the last hundred years, and their complete neglect by possible settlers from the Argentine, would be sufficient to convince most people of the sovereign ...”

“... a degree thinking, the same kind of thoughts as the politicians who are likely to appoint you.’ Ian Blair, Met commissioner between 2005 and 2008, wrote in his memoirs that politicians want the police to be ‘street butlers’, called on ‘when required and invisible the rest of the time’. The commissioner is accountable to both the mayor of London and ...”