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“... wanna be.’ (Bornstein’s memoir is called A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The True Story of a Nice Jewish Boy who joins the Church of Scientology and Leaves Twelve Years Later to Become the Lovely Lady She Is Today.) One of the ways trans people challenge the popular image of human sexuality is by insisting, in the words of the writer and activist ...”

“... into another medium. Television had no doubt seeped into him, as into almost everyone. It is a nice point whether he connected his ‘sequence of images’ with those that appear on the screen. Certainly he was in no sense writing a scenario, or anything like one. As a novel sequence, The Raj Quartet is constructed with enormous care, tact and ...”

“... child. Before the law, or outside it? ‘How is the institution of the removal centre legal?’ David Herd asks in his afterword to Refugee Tales (2016), a collection of stories gathered from refugees by campaigners. ‘Since, in conventional terms, it plainly offends legal principles, what relation does such a site have to the law?’ There are for the ...”

“... after-dinner debris. From left to right they are James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, Edmund Burke, Pasquale Paoli, Charles Burney, Thomas Warton and Oliver Goldsmith. Their names appear below the image, cursively engraved, appositely placed: one might almost be looking at a signed group photograph of 18th-century luminaries. In ...”

“... agreed, among them Saleh Muslim, the leader of the PYD, the YPG’s political arm. In Britain David Richards, the former chief of the defence staff, called on Cameron to accept that Assad’s army was best placed to take the fight to IS. ‘At the moment we’ve got contradictory war aims,’ he told the BBC. ‘We want to deal with Isis but we also want ...”

“... put to fresh use, and the residents of the new villas, though infrequently encountered, seemed nice enough. And surely it was a good thing that orderly lawns and gravel drives had replaced the hazardous bunkers and rusting coils of barbed wire. Nobody thought to wonder why we didn’t know who had bought the land from the War Office; or who (if they were ...”

“... and a loner.’ ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Armstrong said. ‘It’s just that it’s nice to get out of the office once in a while.’ At the pre-launch press conference with Aldrin and Collins, a journalist asked Armstrong whether he would have anything ‘suitably historical and memorable to say when he performed the symbolic act of stepping on ...”

“... That’s all I’m having to do with Victoria Beckham, except to say that she and her husband, David, in their relationship with the press, have taken the notion of abuse, the abuse of one set of human beings by another, to levels that make Billy Connolly’s childhood seem like a chapter from The Swiss Family Robinson. They may be right to feel hunted by ...”

“... those photographs now and am struck by how many of the women present were wearing Chanel suits and David Webb bracelets’), one mood from another. The bassinette was a turning point: ‘Until the bassinette it had all seemed casual, even blithe, not different in spirit from the Jax jerseys and printed cotton Lilly Pulitzer shifts we were all wearing that ...”

“... him out of the kingdom long before his true parentage could be revealed and he could marry that nice Susannah York. Fielding died in 1754 and was succeeded at Bow Street by his half-brother John: ‘blind John’ as he had been since the age of 19, ‘Sir John’ as he became in 1761, after successfully agitating to be knighted so as to increase the ...”

“... He didn’t have much use for the work of his contemporaries and juniors (his fellow Celts David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid were partial exceptions), but was on the whole pleasant about it. A breezy manner (‘Unabashed boys and girls may enjoy them. This book is theirs’), a few eclectic names ...”

“... had not been a particularly intellectual woman, or, according to some witnesses, a particularly nice one. Whether Lewis mostly worshipped her or mostly suffered her, or both or neither, we don’t really know. He began by needing her and ended by looking after her; perhaps it was not such an unusual relationship. In 1926 Lewis began a friendship that was to ...”

“... Beyond the Fringe. A process was set in motion which was to culminate in Jonathan Ross asking David Cameron whether he masturbated when he thought of Mrs Thatcher, and Little Ant and Little Dec asking Blair: ‘If you make an ugly smell, do people pretend not to notice because you is the prime minister?’ The coming series of election debates on TV ...”

“... body is agile and youthful. I’ve seen her naked, and it’s all natural.’ It would be nice to know exactly how many people in the audience were thinking: ‘Up to a point, Lord Copper.’ In any case: ‘She looks better with her clothes off than on . . . The little woman is perfect, vertically and horizontally.’ The party cost ...”

“... Venetia? In one letter, he begged Venetia for a ‘real drive’ – the mind boggles. It would be nice to imagine that Venetia Stanley’s life could be defined by more than just her correspondence with this ‘darling’ man. Buczacki pleads hard that she ‘deserves better’ than to be remembered only for these few years with Asquith. After all, it ...”