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“... Captain Boyle at the Lyceum. Laurence Daly of the Miners’ Union, John Mackintosh MP, Robin Cook. The Hamilton by-election had taken place six months before, and the advent of the SNP had kicked Scottish politics into life. It was a talking rather than a dancing party, and the politics themselves seemed intoxicating enough. Around two we processed ...”

“... to Reith: ‘One cannot,’ he said, ‘be impartial between the fire and the fire brigade.’ Harold Macmillan is widely credited with being a TV ‘natural’. Mr Cockerell’s account makes him out to be anything but that. Huw Weldon observed after his first broadcast as prime minister that the script ‘could not be spoken by one human being to another ...”

“... since it provides the only tenuous link among these people. The most officious of the strangers, Harold Chapman (a Docklands property-dealer in his other life) is approached for money with vague menaces by a local peasant family who own a crumbling wall that’s threatening to block the way, and he in turn approaches his various neighbours. So it’s a plot ...”

“... and would have refused to accept it ‘from hands still stained with blood’ – a reference to Harold Macmillan, then prime minister. However, it was the end of his lifelong friendship with Namier. ‘I put down the telephone and never spoke to him again... Namier was dead so far as I was concerned.’ All he says about the victorious candidate at this ...”

“... election to the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee – the first non-MP to do so since Harold Laski – and carved out a space for himself there, allied with but not wholly subsumed by the Bennites. When Neil Kinnock took on Militant, Blunkett dragged his feet, publicly offered Derek Hatton an olive branch, and was considered ‘fundamentally ...”

“... of acting with the person in question. ‘A sweetie? Are we talking about the same person?’ ‘Harold Pinter? Can you be serious?’ ‘She’s a bit …’ with a tipping of the elbow to indicate drink taken. I’ve often thought of putting such a session in a play, but unless the names of real actors are used it wouldn’t work.24 January. Watch a DVD of ...”

“... magic circle of lobby men, lunching with him at St Stephen’s Club once a week. He saw Harold Wilson every week too, with the other members of the ‘White Commonwealth’, as the handpicked political editors were then called. Yet he did not grow to love or respect these great men. On the contrary, in his book he portrays most of the prime ...”

“... and his friend to the cinema when she was called into the Commons to deputise for her boss, Robin Cook, who was stuck in Edinburgh. She says it would have been easy enough to change her plans, but ‘my maternal self-esteem, precarious at the best of times, would have collapsed altogether if I turned into one of those parents who let their children down ...”

“... schools for women. Dashi made from seaweed or dried fish was for grandmothers: the modern home cook believed in efficiency and innovation.It was time for the bottled miracle to take on the world. After expansion into Japan’s colonial possessions – noodle shops and street vendors in Taiwan, food dealerships in Korea – it infiltrated China by ...”

“... Cochrane, by white youths, by concluding that immigration should be drastically reduced. In 1962, Harold Macmillan’s Conservative government, sometimes revered by liberals for decolonisation in Africa as well as its supposed domestic moderation, passed the Commonwealth Immigrants Act. Its system of categories and vouchers was officially based on ...”

“... not just a mockery of it, as is the proleptic and unacknowledged winning entry in that contest, Harold Pinter’s Proust Screenplay, written in 1972 for Joseph Losey, but never filmed: a brilliant, synoptic, allusive evocation of the whole of A la recherche du temps perdu. Völker Schlöndorf’s film Swann in Love (1983), by comparison, adapted just the ...”

“... bacchantes, and squeaked about sex over cocoa and boiled eggs; Mrs Colenbrander tells us that when Harold and Laura Knight arrived: ‘Their brilliant painting stunned the whole colony.’ After Damit and Horse, there was Tottie Harwood and literary London. Edith Jesse didn’t want her daughter back at home after college, so she started to write to keep ...”

“... Parallax View, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Annie Hall, American Graffiti, Star Wars, Harold and Maude, Two-Lane Blacktop, Five Easy Pieces, The King of Marvin Gardens, Badlands. These are the movies reviewed by Lane that he lists: Indecent Proposal, Sleepless in Seattle, Speed, Wolf, Forrest Gump, Pulp Fiction, Braveheart, The Bridges of Madison ...”

“... reference: ‘Imagine. All the VICE SQUAD with their big fat woodies come to have a Captain Cook.’ The most accomplished speaker of this private language, and the great enricher of the novel, is its second narrator, Hugh Boone, or Slow Bones, who alternates narration with Michael. Carey has said that As I Lay Dying had a great influence on him, and ...”

“... to read about the day seven chauffeurs mutinied over their treatment by a sneakily parsimonious cook. Two fussy maiden ladies who asked about the cost of stabling their Austin Seven were told ‘If you care to take it up to your bedroom there will be no charge for garage.’ I do not like to think what he would have told me to do with my sports Morgan ...”