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“... rogue exception’ and his crime ‘an exceptionally unhappy event’ in the paper’s history. David Cameron then satisfied himself that Myler’s predecessor, Andy Coulson (who had resigned following Goodman’s conviction), was fit to manage his relations with the press. The appointment of Coulson, made in May 2007 on the recommendation of the shadow ...”

“... all others. It was founded in Oxford by Edward Lean, the younger brother of the film director David Lean, and was dedicated to the reading and discussion of creative work in progress. When Lean graduated, Lewis took it over. The group was for men only. (Dorothy L. Sayers, a keen Christian and an admirer of Lewis, was excluded.) At first, meetings were ...”

“... other factor in my favour is that, compared to most other guys, I have nothing to lose.He nurses a jones for the agency’s older, married female boss. When his moment finally comes – her bare legs stretched before him on the coffee table – she says: ‘Take me – or your Christmas bonus.’ It’s a hilarious Jack Benny ‘Your money or your ...”

“... wealthy interlopers​ most determined to flout local traditions were the Barclay brothers. Sir David and Sir Frederick, owners of the Daily Telegraph, became interested in Sark affairs after they bought the small neighbouring island of Brecqhou in 1993 and spent millions on a castle and gardens there. Under Sark’s tax laws, they were liable to pay the ...”

“... a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside story of how Bowie met John Lennon’; a lockdown viewing of the dreary Richard Curtis film Yesterday; a mystifying Japanese tweet, apparently about Ringo.And those are just the ones I remembered to jot ...”

“... pole-squatting and the like – were associated, by the instant social historians, with the Dow-Jones and the acquisitive excitements of the times. In Germany, however, hiking and food-faddism, the escape from the city and the movement back to nature, are now seen as symptomatic progenitors of anti-semitism and fascism. Shrapnel is cautious, agnostic ...”

“... forms, including a kind of nervous male bluster masquerading as chivalry. When Mervyn Griffith-Jones put his famous question to the Lady Chatterley trial jury about the reading-matter appropriate to wives and servants, he may have had in mind the criteria applied by a Sunday Times editor in 1949 to The Naked and the Dead. ‘No decent man could leave it ...”

“... by a mob including, it was said, men in the livery of the secretary of state Henry Bolingbroke. David Edwards, the fugitive printer of the Memorial, was wise to lie low. It would have surprised Edwards to be told, while in hiding, that state censorship was a thing of the past, but for many years that is what historians of the period argued. In 1695 the ...”

“... Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible ...”

“... one of the newer kinds of alienation. ‘Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,’ David Bowie sang in ‘Space Oddity’, the song that captured something of that strangeness. (It was featured in the BBC’s live coverage of the lunar landing.) Bowie, in his spaceman/ androgyne mode, conveyed the idea that space travel could change a man for ...”

“... identification. A chapter of Backroom Boys tracks the process by which two Cambridge students, David Braben and Ian Bell, used elegant mathematical fixes to get round the limited memory available on home computers in the early 1980s while writing an epoch-making computer game, Elite: Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel ...”

“... to Italy from Hollywood) with Farley Granger; De Sica’s Stazione Termini (1953) starred Jennifer Jones and Montgomery Clift. De Sica had originally planned to make Bicycle Thieves with Hollywood funding. David O. Selznick, the prospective producer, wanted Cary Grant for the lead role; De Sica suggested Henry Fonda. Umberto ...”

“... Her appearances were always lively. Wearing black leather and stilettos, she flirted with David Letterman, telling him that the ‘important lesson’ she learned from her father is ‘balls’: ‘I somehow grew them somewhere along the line.’ Conan O’Brien was a bit shrill for her taste, shrieking about portraits painted in blood and the time ...”

“... died of before. Men dying in the time it takes to catch and throw off a cold: ‘One Thursday,’ David France writes in How to Survive a Plague, ‘sexy Tommy McCarthy from the classifieds department stayed out late at an Yma Sumac concert. Friday he had a fever. Sunday he was hospitalised. Wednesday he was dead.’ Later, there were tests. A virus ...”

“... literature, his reactions were not without a touch of sceptical irreverence (Ernest Jones becomes ‘Erogenous Jones’); and a whole tradition of thought about the cogito and the unconscious, from Descartes to Lacan, was later summarised and parodied in the wonderful exchange between the two anti-heroes of ...”