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“... crunch, she would prefer the interests of her family over the demands of her art. The pram in the hall is usually thought of as getting in the way of the male writer as he tries to leave the house; no one makes allowances for a neglectful mother – not now, and certainly not then. A more suffocatingly conventional society it would be hard to imagine than ...”

“... was reflected in the holding of the Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition at the Albert Hall to mark Queen Victoria’s jubilee, and in the formation of the Jewish Historical Society of England six years later. Concern about integrating the new immigrants into Anglo-Jewry led to the hurried building of new synagogues in areas such as ...”

“... till his arm ached, and then he flung him into a chair, gasping, cursing, and scarcely human. And Richard Chandos v. Boler, the Boche villain of Dornford Yates’s Cost Price:   ‘Look on your own face,’ I said; ‘for, by God, when you see it next, it won’t look the same.’   Then, as a man puts the weight, I put his face to the wall beside the ...”

“... happy and proud to have been given the chance to serve beside him.’ The comrade-in-arms here is Richard Ingrams, with whom Waugh is now serving on a new journal called the Oldie. Ingrams, we learn from a recent interview, also has a father-problem. He told Lynn Barber that ‘he could not have worked for Private Eye if his father had been alive, because ...”

“... philistinism of local notables and the formality of the court. A generation later the 25-year-old Richard Strauss was hired, but like others before him felt blocked by petty bureaucrats and insufficiently supported (or recompensed) by his patron. After five years he went back to Munich. The wealthy cosmopolitan Count Harry Kessler moved to Weimar in the ...”

“... of medical characters in Shakespeare’s plays after his daughter Susanna’s marriage to Dr John Hall. Can we – should we – tell ourselves not to be interested in such information? For some critics (not including Burrow) avoiding biographical readings has been a way of ignoring the troubling evidence that Shakespeare loved a man. In an admirable effort ...”

“... fired by rabid anti-semitism or inspired by Völkisch crankiness that figure on the fringes of Richard Griffiths’s Fellow Travellers of the Right (1980), a book to which Kershaw pays just tribute. A peer of his standing did not consort with plebs and outsiders. He was the most respectable, and because of his coalmines in County Durham the richest, of the ...”

“... floor, snug in their net sacks, 100,000 biodegradable balloons were ready for action. The great hall was flooded with the glare of insincerity: arc lights, monitors, the lamps of the world that brighten and recede. Every state in the union plays its part, hollering and placarding for their own, with a sense of being very democratically photographed, as if ...”

“... that these ‘docu-dramas’ are a new phenomenon, a modern hybrid. Those with long memories cite Richard Brooks’s 1967 film In Cold Blood as a prototype. Based on Truman Capote’s account of a quadruple murder in rural Kansas, the film was shot in vérité black and white and used the actual locations where the killings took place. But the true crime ...”

“... the elements that dress Seabrook’s whippy style: the Meades-to-camera performed prose, the music-hall delivery of arcane information. Seabrook is scornful of Colindale researchers, library hacks, scissors and paste men. You have to be there. You have to see it. Sniff the candy floss and petroleum jelly. ‘Peter Ackroyd never set foot in Margate for his ...”

“... clue is in the name … the Party of workers, not shirkers.’ Byrne rented an apartment in County Hall overlooking the Thames, costing £2400 a month, courtesy of the taxpayer, and once claimed £400 of public money for food in a single month, quite legitimately in each case. Another example, more drastic, from the Conservatives: ‘...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... of expression might – only might – cease to be perceived as a menace to national security. As Richard Sakwa’s book suggests, Putin has a choice of two directions. One is simply to ‘reconcentrate state power’. The other is to ‘reconstitute’ that power in a new form by imposing the rule of law. Putin talks a lot about ‘the dictatorship of ...”

“... from these paintings and there they were: Lady Una Troubridge with a monocle in her eye; Radclyffe Hall in a marvellous hunting outfit with a terrific hunting hat. It was the all-time ultimate gallery of all the famous dykes from 1880 to 1935 or thereabouts.Barney walked round the room telling Capote about each picture painted by Brooks, her long-term ...”

“... have been a terrifying scene. The barons led by Montfort and Hugh Bigod marched into Westminster Hall in full armour, though they had the decency to leave their swords outside. Henry instantly appreciated the severity of his plight. ‘What is this, my lords, am I, poor wretch, your prisoner?’ In theory, he wasn’t, or not yet, but over the years of ...”