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“... to ‘behaviour’ and strong on obedience. Proprietary dog-food, appealingly humanised – James Spratt’s ‘Meal Fibrine Dog Cakes’, for example – was added to the household’s grocery-list. No longer just a man’s best friend or a lady’s toy, the dog was a member of the family. And if dogs were the children who never grew up, they also ...”

“... gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use of coke for iron smelting in 1709, James Watt’s invention of the external-condenser steam engine in 1765, and the sinking of the first oil well by Elmer Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 – all of them, we might note, English-speaking businessmen. The three significant fossil fuels ...”

“... brackish and personal way, elements of the classical tradition (their Economist Building in St James’s was a well-crafted, contextual work for an establishment client), it was all over for Banham – it was a betrayal, after which he went to look elsewhere for his architecture autre. The nearest​ that any of the Brutalist revival volumes published in ...”

“... back-room Tory ideas men tinkering obscurely with economic models while Edward Heath and Harold Wilson squared off against the unions in the 1960s and 1970s. (Howell was Thatcher’s first energy minister. He is now Baron Howell of Guildford, Foreign Office minister, still in government at the age of 76 under his fellow Etonian David Cameron, alongside his ...”

“... two incongruous neighbours: A.E. Housman, anchored by misanthropy to this out-of-the-way spot, and James Klugmann, the chief Communist student organiser, and later a life-long Party worker. I.2 was not an ideal residence. When a gust of wind blew, the small fire, over which toast could be made with the help of a long fork and much patience, threw out billowing ...”

“... furniture, and didn’t calm down until a doctor arrived and injected her with a tranquilliser. James McCord, head of the plumbers, the White House unit which broke into the DNC Watergate offices, who had been a bodyguard to the Mitchells, later said that she’d been kidnapped.In Haldeman’s diary, Martha in the summer of 1972 was as big a problem for the ...”

“... doesn’t seem very long since I did the same for Roy Jenkins. At Bodley I’m overtaken by A.N. Wilson, who’s brought his gown in a Sainsbury’s bag, though it’s part of Roy Jenkins’s legacy that gowns are no longer required on such occasions. This doesn’t stop many of the voters swishing about in them for the benefit of their families, who are ...”

“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward ...”

“... only that Oswald is an insufferable name (Who was Oswald Fish? asks the initialled onomast A.N. Wilson), awash with the sub-Shakespearean sinister and histrionic, and darkly seconded by Mosley’s middle name (‘Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley’). For Tom is such a relief of a contrast to Oswald. It would have been difficult, however well-justified, to animate ...”

“... of the process of writing, she’s building a canvas as well as she is putting on the paint,’ James Taylor, another conquest, explained. ‘It’s never straight on.’ Mitchell’s lyrical indirection, the habit of thinking against conventional tropes, is an extension of what she calls her ‘perverse need for originality’, a manifestation of a ...”

“... was well put by one of the first grown-up critics to write about detective fiction, Edmund Wilson, in his 1945 essay-review, ‘Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?’ Her writing is of a mawkishness and banality that seem to me literally impossible to read. You cannot read such a book, you run through it to see the problem worked out; and you cannot ...”

“... media scapegoating. Heath called the ‘Who governs Britain?’ general election, and lost. Harold Wilson’s Labour government then pushed the unions into a policy of supposedly voluntary wage restraint with the Social Contract, while continuing to let unemployment rise and living standards fall. People were ‘once again bemused and confused by the spectacle ...”

“... Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created equal’ – but, as James Shapiro recently showed in Shakespeare in a Divided America, he also thought that Desdemona’s ‘fondling with Othello is disgusting’ and her passion for him ‘unnatural solely and exclusively because of his colour’. It would be convenient if such ...”

“... Oscar Wilde, Melville, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Dickinson, Benjamin Franklin, the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Erasmus, all within the first three paragraphs. Some appreciate Hardwick’s tacit assumption of her readers’ sophistication; the rest of us feel bamboozled.The​ essays in Seduction and Betrayal were written when Hardwick and ...”

“... trying for a half a century to distinguish the writer from the talking ghost, and some – Edmund Wilson, for instance – found it easier to do the trick than Hemingway himself. When he was young, he worked very hard at never saying anything the way anybody else would say it, and his success was remarkable. Later he often managed to do it again, when the ...”