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“... was to have made Donnie Brasco but for domestic reasons couldn’t leave Los Angeles. When I said I knew nothing of the Mafia, they said nobody did except, possibly, ‘your friend Marty’. I had known nothing of the 18th century or indeed of Pakistanis, but Hanif Kureishi had ...”

“... case some readers may not have heard of him. He was born in 1906, the son of a rich industrialist, Edward Tennant, who became Lord Glenconner in 1911, and of Pamela Wyndham, one of the Wyndham sisters immortalised by Sargent in his painting The Three Graces. Margot Tennant, who married Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, was his paternal aunt. Tennant spent ...”

“... all is well.’ Mrs Bennett scarcely carries conviction when she contends that the ostentation of Edward VII’s court appalled Margot, who found it, her biographer claims, ‘alien to the climate of the times, which was one of industrial deprivation and unemployment’. Too much inclined to take Margot’s effusions at face value, the author tends to echo ...”

“... where he was born, but it was an excuse to play with a new archive. I found him straight away. Edward Reginald Hill was just where I expected him to be, in Eltham, South London, an only child living with his parents. It was a bigger household than I had realised. His maternal grandfather and great-grandmother were living with them, but the address was more ...”

“... the other way, as Hutton indicated in Witches, Druids and King Arthur (2003). The same could be said about King Arthur as about druids. On the one hand we have the ‘historical King Arthur’, about whom we know effectively nothing – not even whether such a person existed, for there is no contemporary evidence for him at all, and the closest approaches ...”

“... Savile Row façade was festooned to celebrate the state visit of Napoleon III and the wedding of Edward VII, both Poole men. In The Suit, Christopher Breward writes of the tailor’s ‘crucial ritual’ of measuring the client, a practice he believes has been overlooked because of its ‘intensely personal nature’. ‘Customers seem not to have patience ...”

“... into the sea as far as a horse could stand, or where a man could reach with a long pole; others said it was ‘so far into the seas as they could from the shore discern a Humberkin’ – apparently a kind of floating barrel. But the Admiralty judge Sir Henry Marten complained in 1637 that this was ‘an old idle saying, no man living being able to tell us ...”

“... stamped on instead. Few favourites lasted a reign, let alone a regime change. As Sir Henry Wotton said, ‘the state of a favourite is at the best but a tenant-at-will.’ Favourites could find themselves out of favour, they could overreach or be pulled down by envy. That astute observer of Stuart monarchs, John Milton, has his Satan describe Adam as God’s ...”

“... relates to Ernie Bevin’s working-class way with aspirates. We must set up an ad hoc committee, said Bevin at some international meeting, and the delegate from an important fish-producing country insisted that he himself must obviously be a member of any such committee. And – as befits a man who has been at the centre of great events in stirring times ...”

“... clearly defined. Riggs touches on it briefly in connection with Jonson, to whom Shakespeare is said to have administered a ‘purge that made him bewray his credit’ (i.e. ‘beshit’ himself, as Riggs glosses). Duncan Salkeld gives a lively account of the brief and pungent career of George Wilkins, a little-read author who combined literature with a ...”

“... war party was ‘just’. Like the politicians against the war, the writers against the war – Edward Pearce in the Guardian, John Diamond in the Mirror, John Pilger wherever anyone prints what he writes – have to be winkled out from the chauvinist mass. How to explain the mood which swept otherwise independent-minded journalists and editors into the ...”

“... in various newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... his wife, Lynne, if it annoyed her that people referred to him as Darth Vader. Not at all, she said, ‘it humanises you.’ Cheney’s daughter, Liz, a media-friendly blonde soccer mom and the Republican Representative for Wyoming’s statewide congressional district, has none of her father’s gruffness, but she is just as hawkishly conservative. She ...”

“... which agreed that the Queen of Scots, still a baby, would eventually marry Henry VIII’s son, Edward. Had Edward lived, and the union between England and Scotland held, she would have become queen of England, Elizabeth’s ‘sister’. Instead, Scotland turned to France, and Mary was betrothed to the dauphin. Her ...”

“... with a perception until it turns into a conceit. Pheasants on the Icknield Way – which is said to be one of the oldest roads in Britain, predating the Romans – have ‘copper flank armour and white dog-collars (hoplite vicars)’ and a grebe on a pond is ‘punkishly tufted as Ziggy Stardust’. Starlings have feathers ‘sleekly black as sheaves of ...”