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“... about the cornfields of Illinois’ (the opening passage of his unfinished last novel, The Pale King, could be described similarly) and ‘a story about a pretty girl whose drunk boyfriend kills her in a car crash’. Wallace took a job driving a school bus but quit after students mouthed off at him, abandoning them on the bus and walking home. That ...”

“... way, the mathematical sublime has cast its spell. At the end of the fourth act of Henry V, the King asks his herald for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and ...”

“... and the wimpish immunity from real pain and consequence of the later generation of Fleurs and Michael Mounts let the Saga fade and decline until, like the King Emperor, it slowly sank. Updike began with affection, and he never loses tolerance – the fat Harry of Rest is kin to the slender Harry of Run – but the ...”

“... having examined the child, claimed to have detected promise of mathematical genius. Moving on to King Edward VI Grammar School in Aston, Reed specialised in Classics. Since Greek was not taught, he taught himself, and went on to win the Temperley Latin prize and a scholarship to Birmingham University. There he was taught and befriended – as were his ...”

“... Britain by William Klein examines some of the modifications. The picture is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive ...”

“... in Hobbes owes its impetus to the writings of three men: Howard Warrender, Quentin Skinner and Michael Oakeshott; of these, it is Warrender’s book The Political Philosophy of Hobbes (1957) that has produced the greatest quantity of subsequent discussion and development. This book had the merit of taking Hobbes seriously as a major moral and political ...”

“... family firm with his modern know-how: he was almost a British version of the Yankee at King Arthur’s court. Cecil Rex Niven went to Balliol during and after the First World War, a contemporary of Harold Macmillan and Beverley Nichols. By Independence Day 1960 he had become Sir Rex Niven and had recently resigned his post as Speaker of the ...”

“... cook up a little more, the cooking being apparently done by lolo Morganwg in the back room of the King Lud pub at the end of Fleet Street. Look, finally, at the Bible, guarantee and user’s manual for ‘Western Christian Civilisation’. Much of the Old Testament purports to be the table-talk of Jehovah, brought to us by pseudonymous but highly-placed ...”

“... and beautiful, quite unlike any previous art. Other St Martin’s sculptors included Phillip King, Tim Scott and William Tucker, all innovative artists who became tutors at St Martin’s immediately after completing their own studies. Thenceforward there was a line of sculptors at St Martins who changed, even further, the concept of what sculpture might ...”

“... drive a man to child abuse, so I am delighted to find the Burma excuse put to flight by Francis King, a school contemporary of Trench’s. He remembers Trench the schoolboy as ‘supercilious, capricious and cruel’ long before the Japanese ever laid a finger on him. Mark Peel describes the floggings at Shrewsbury as ‘a real outlet for Trench’s ...”

“... undistracted by ambition. Boorman may be the most inspired and wayward of English directors since Michael Powell.Not that Powell would have attempted Point Blank. Not that anyone in 1967 had reason to think that a young Englishman raised on the leafy edges of south London (Carshalton, and later Shepperton) would know how to go to Los Angeles (and San ...”

“... for Change would not be implemented until the lessons of the war had been analysed. However, Tom King, then the Secretary of State for Defence, had already promised to give the outline to Parliament before it broke up for the summer recess, and we still live with the consequences. The ‘coalition of the willing’ that came together to achieve the removal ...”

“... on morale: it persuaded the majority that everyone was in this together when they read of the king being served spam. Of course, there were some inequalities, and an enterprising black market (Private Walker in Dad’s Army); and I still remember (or think I do) the farmers in Staffordshire who grudgingly took me and my mother in as evacuees towards the ...”

“... Most of the politicians now in power are ‘the same warlords and murderers’, as Archbishop Michael Francis told me last year. According to the Accra guidelines, sitting politicians are not allowed to stand for election, but there have already been shameless manoeuvrings. ‘People come here and shake my hand,’ Klein says, ‘and they say they want to ...”

“... of his prolific (hetero)sexual adventures: he had, says a more up-to-date historian than Rowse, Michael MacDonald, ‘a mesmerising personality and the sexual appetite of a goat’, and studded his diary with his ‘haleking’, as he put it, with an A to Z of his women, and with planning or avoiding such occasions as his consultation of the stars ...”