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“... of money. However, it is swift and beautiful, and appears quite a vessel. Williams is captain, and we drive along in this delightful bay in the evening wind … until earth appears another world.’ But at night the hallucinations continued, and he woke the house with his screaming. He saw Edward and Jane Williams, ‘their bodies lacerated, their bones ...”

“... to it as another seems, in retrospect, almost Churchillian in its fixedness. Back then, although we loved the old rogue for the rodomontade and sheer cheek of his rhetoric, we got rid of him and his Party as quickly as possible afterwards: real life has few, if any, eternal verities. A British conscript Army at the end of ...”

“... life was a glorious adventure in which being a beautiful, spirited woman among men, decades before we were liberated en masse, was an advantage. Of course, you had to be untainted by any physical or social insecurity, indeed not know the meaning of fear, but then the world was yours: to the discomfort of Gellhorn’s father, who felt she might have taken her ...”

“... Revolution; most recently (in flashes) during the 1968 ‘events’ of Berlin and the Paris May. We, or our children, will see it again. In Barcelona and Catalonia, this epiphany was released (they wouldn’t have liked the word ‘led’) by anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists. Orwell arrived there in December 1936 to ‘fight fascism’ and walked about ...”

“... the present Lord Rothermere – or, worse, of Sir Jocelyn Stevens or the late Lord (‘Whelks’) Matthews – in the same tone of voice as Beaverbrook is a substantial affront to natural justice. Fortunately, Griffiths is more generous to the other main agent in the building up of the modern Evening Standard. Charles Wintour was its editor for a total of 19 ...”

“... have a perfect text of the Diary provided for me. How grateful I am to Robert Latham and William Matthews. I have happy domestic news to report. My wife is safely back from hospital. Her malady has passed over, even though the doctors are not sure what was the cause of it. I do not like leading a solitary existence in an otherwise empty house. I do not like ...”

“... of ambulances, to shouts in the street, to the speeding cars of a violent Police, may reflect that we have worse things to fear than banshees. But at the end of the last century M.R. James’s head lay easy, pillowed on Eton and King’s. In the introduction to this reissue, ‘Monty’s’ stories are made, by one of the Oxford Book editors, to look like a ...”

“... with dreams the tendency to be either beyond comprehension or all too obvious in meaning. When we read that in January 1818 two women were admitted separately to Charenton ‘entirely deranged’ by the price of bread and the fear that they could no longer feed their children, the connection between reality and delusion comes ready-made. At other times the ...”

“... when combined with his adulation of Beryl Graves. Though Seymour-Smith apparently detests T.S. Matthews, his Under the Influence (1978) gives a much more lively impression of Graves’s domestic milieu in the Thirties. While it is true that Riding got Graves in trouble with the police and with almost everyone he knew, it was the kind of trouble he ...”

“... disconsolate that he had to urge me to censor my work. Turning his head, almost shyly, he said: ‘We don’t want to attack our friends.’ ‘Oh, but I think we do,’ I replied, sitting down comfortably. He tried sweet reason, man-to-man argument, but I was obstinate. So he switched gear – and denounced ...”

“... haggle between TV and the Football League. It’s Charlton versus West Ham in the Cup and we are being exhorted to look out for West Ham’s new ‘goal-machine’, the Scottish striker McAvennie: ‘Now you’ll be able to see him for yourself,’ the papers say – an oddish line for journalists to take, I would have thought, but there ...”

“... Our prediction of accelerating inflation had nothing to do with money growth two years earlier. We thought that inflation would accelerate because of the explosion in oil and other commodity prices interacting with the unfortunate ‘threshold’ scheme which, for a year, hiked wages point for point with the retail price index. I still think our reasons ...”

“... in numbered boxes himself, rattling away. In the seventeen chapters of Old God’s Time, we – and he as well – get to see what’s in them. Change the figure. Not the seventeen, that’s a given, but the boxes. Barry keeps gently, incrementally adding to our knowledge of Kettle, and Kettle’s of himself. ‘A human person could only be revealed ...”

“... Inside South Africa, who will read it? The editors note that, at the outset, they agreed that ‘we would proceed as if the apparatus of censorship did not exist.’ This is an anthology for export only.André Brink took primary responsibility for selecting the work translated from Afrikaans; J.M. Coetzee for that in English. They do not represent their own ...”

“... a successful newspaper. Instead of doing something about the lack of a paper to support them, we have griping resolutions at party conferences and the deplorable spectacle of some of the print unions themselves undermining press freedom by refusing to allow publication of editorials critical of the unions: those self-same censors are among the loudest to ...”