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“... he had long coveted: the confidence of a reforming Secretary of State for War. The Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, realising that the Blimps needed shock treatment, cannily and even mischievously arranged for it to come in the form of Leslie Hore-Belisha, patron saint of road safety. This unlikeliest of all holders of the office was, Danchev ...”

“... or cowardice in the faces opposite them. Tube poetry between the world wars, from F.S. Flint and Richard Aldington to Eliot and Auden, is a monument to triteness. None of these writers took the trouble to grasp the experience of underground travel in its specificity, as Hitchcock did, as Gissing and James had done. They rendered it as an unvarying condition ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... to rescue an ‘office-boy intelligentsia’, represented (unrepresentatively) by such figures as Neville Cardus, later music (and cricket) correspondent for the Manchester Guardian, and Richard Church, a prolific author and subsequently poetry editor for Dent. This leads him into a fierce attack on E.M. Forster for his ...”

“... Shaw since childhood. ‘Only a musician’s appreciation has any gratification for me,’ he told Neville Cardus. Getting to know the great body of music from Bach to Sibelius was ‘far more educative’, he said, than being dragged through dead languages. From Mozart, ‘the master of masters’, he believed he had learnt how to say profound things in a ...”

“... had made Imran Khan forget his law of evidence and the normal practice of the court. In July 1996, Neville Lawrence told a Channel Four documentary that the judge ‘had been brought down from Birmingham to do a special job and he did it’. Doreen Lawrence had earlier complained of the CPS being ‘tone deaf to our existence and our needs and concerns’. In ...”

“... Lyndon Johnson is alive. James Jones is alive. Jim Morrison and Robert Penn Warren are alive. Richard Nixon is dead; and a Soviet-bloc skier named Ivana Trump – someone overhears Sixties psychic Jeanne Dixon saying – will assign her name to a novel she does not write with the full and worldwide backing of one of America’s largest publishing ...”

“... it had been stolen from him shortly before the murders. The star witness for the prosecution was Neville Butler, a reporter on the Caribbean Echo, a small newspaper that served West Indians in Miami. Butler testified that Maharaj had paid the newspaper $400 to accuse the Moo Youngs of theft. The Moo Youngs then got the newspaper to publish a series of ...”

“... David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography simply has to have a narrative, and a non-prescriptive approach tends to sap the narrative. What will ...”

“... reputation for bellicosity being his only claim to office, Churchill could hardly exceed Neville Chamberlain’s enthusiasm for peace. It was of course Chamberlain who had started the war, as peace-lovers often do, not just by formally declaring war on Germany while Germany was merely waging war on Poland, but by having issued the unilateral ...”

“... around the country, so medieval-sounding names crowded around the font: Arthur, Walter, Harold and Neville, Ethel, Edith and Dorothy, soon to be supplemented by endless Geoffreys. This remarkable efflorescence has been described as a ‘personalisation’ of names, although since in this period the ‘proper’ name one gave to registrars and census ...”

“... England at the time’, was Beatrice, the eldest daughter of Joseph Chamberlain and half-sister of Neville. Beatrice Chamberlain was a friend of the Strachey family: one of Lytton’s earliest memories was of her ‘playing at having tea with me, with leaves and acorns, under a tree.’ She was older than Dorothy Strachey, as Laura is older than Olivia, and ...”

“... in the middle of a field.20 January. Collected by the New Yorker and taken to be photographed by Richard Avedon, now a grey-haired faun of 72 who says he’s bored with taking snapshots in the studio (this morning Isaiah Berlin and Stephen Spender) and wants to photograph me outside. ‘Outside’ means that eventually I find myself perched up a tree in Hyde ...”

“... on the Austrian resistance; but he has done little else. Another account of the controversy – Richard Evans’s In Hitler’s Shadow – is better informed, and more perceptive. Professor Evans shows in abundantly documented detail how the arguments the embattled historians are advancing ‘are derived, consciously or unconsciously, from the propaganda of ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”