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“... Birmingham City Council had already ordered an inquiry, to be headed by the education consultant Ian Kershaw. Gove nevertheless announced his own inquiry, bigger and certainly more inflammatory, as a result of his decision to select Clarke, a former head of counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Police, to lead it. Clarke’s report was published just as ...”

“... by threatening to cut or curtail its External Services broadcasting. The director general, Ian Jacob, rightly sensing that the country was divided on the issue, stood by the corporation’s commitment to even-handed reporting. Once American pressure had forced Eden into a humiliating withdrawal from the Canal Zone, the threat evaporated, but the ...”

“... from its breast He draws, and does his stroke detest, Fearing the flesh untimely mowed To him as black a fate forebode. Melville knew Marvell’s work: in his Republican novella Billy Budd, he picks up the phrase ‘starry vere’ from ‘Upon Appleton House’. In these twinned republican imaginations, Leviathan, the state as whale, as monster of the ...”

“... spectacle: ‘Kofi and Nane, both enormously attractive and disarmingly modest, the one short and black and the other tall and blonde, made for a dazzling couple: they projected a kind of moral glamour’ (sic). Meisler too dwells on Annan’s status as a ‘social star of New York society’, dining and partying three times a week. But disavowing ...”

“... less well than a lot of professional writers. The photo of a beaming 75-year-old Jenkins in black tie being awarded the Whitbread biography prize in 1995 for his Life of Gladstone suggests a life well-rounded in many senses. And yet, nagging questions about Jenkins’s politics and political leadership – and, indeed, about the shape of modern British ...”

“... David Bowie, who was raised, like the author, in Bromley. Similarly, Kureishi’s next novel The Black Album was named after a bootleg LP by Prince to whom the main character, Shahid, is devoted. Prince plunders freely from various musical genres, from rock or disco or funk or rap. To popular amusement he is forever adopting new personae: a satyr, an ...”

“... didn’t really know or even like but who just happened to be marooned in Oxford out of term.One black mark against Larkin is that he no more cares for the work of Flannery O’Connor than Amis did: ‘The day didn’t get off to a very good start by my reading some stories by “Flannery O’Connor” in the bath … horribly depressing American South ...”

“... during that episode of homicidal narcissism. He was also sure that the time was overdue to concede black Americans their natural rights as citizens, and used his coercive power on the Hill to this explicit end: the first time in history that such clout had ever been employed in that way. He threw away much of this gain by pursuing Kennedy’s fantasy of ...”

“... Eliot). As a reviewer and essayist, he gave respect and appreciation to such various talents as Ian Fleming and Dick Francis, Michael Innes and Gladys Mitchell – all British writers. It is hard to believe that he hadn’t read, at some time between its first British publication in 1943 and the writing of ‘High Windows’ in 1967, a book by the writer ...”

“... life. At the time of his death, Williams had published five novels (two volumes of People of the Black Mountains appeared posthumously). They have had their admirers, especially the first, Border Country, but on the whole they have seemed distinctly secondary to his theoretical and critical work, and many readers have returned a negative answer to the ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... Watson’s poodle dialectics. After all, it was the not notably socialist Ackroyd who (along with Ian Patterson and Nick Totton) published the first bulletin from the Zappa papers in 1979: stapled small press format. It’s a breeze for Watson to present himself as a schizoid, high-Culture virtuoso who is dedicating years of his life (risking his equilibrium ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... lived in the quasi-monastic style of an academic gypsy, kept a room in his house painted entirely black, and for many years seems to have survived on a diet consisting mostly of blondies (a chocolateless variant on the brownie). Max’s fixation with ‘normality’ (‘Wallace’s childhood was happy and ordinary’) is part of a popularising mission. He ...”