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“... a day. Coulson had Timothy Langdale, the plummy doyen of the Bar, at a cost of £7000 a day. Andrew Edis, whose crisp, untheatrical delivery made you feel he was telling the truth, acted for the Crown on £570 a day. Before the case began, the fifty randomly selected jurors crowding Court 12 were trimmed to a dozen. Anyone self-employed, with children, a ...”

“... the election had been called. Towards the end of my conversation with Hussain, another councillor, Martin Repton, came along. He told me the situation with Williamson’s candidacy was ‘a little localised problem, which should be resolved today’. An hour later the NEC ruled that Williamson would not after all be permitted to stand in Derby North. A few ...”

“... had discovered inoperable cancer. The surgeon told his companion, Monica Jones, who, according to Andrew Motion’s biography of Larkin, decided to keep the news to herself. She was worried about the effect of a terminal diagnosis on a man who had often expressed his terror of dying. So Larkin’s doctors kept up a cheerful front and told him that they were ...”

“... nothing happen, then the poetry anthology has no such self-effacing qualms. Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion knew this, as did the predecessor they were tussling with, A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry (which was tussling with its predecessor, Robert Conquest’s New Lines). ‘This anthology,’ they wrote in their preface to the Penguin Book of Contemporary ...”

“... Metamagical Themas – an anagram of the formula ‘Mathematical Games’ used by his predecessor Martin Gardner, but also referring to the ‘metamathematics’ rooted in Gödel’s discovery. These columns are now collected together in this new book. But there is more to it than this, not only because of its new postscripts, but also because it embraces ...”

“... How to Be Good now extends this fine line of wit even further: Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman ...”

“... largely considered. Carey tells of a drunken assault on a Bob Dylan puppet belonging to the writer Andrew Sinclair and kept in his house, in a bedroom used by the Goldings. Waking in the night, Golding mistook the puppet for Satan, attacked it and buried it in the garden. There are other reports of barely credible drunken violence and insult. Sometimes it ...”

“... to James Barry’s 1776 engraving The Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom. In the engraving Andrew Marvell is depicted with Milton, Locke and Algernon Sidney among the mourners at the bier of Britain’s traditional liberties. Across a pond the mourners can see a Neoclassical rotunda with an eagle-like phoenix raising its strong wings. Below the cupola ...”

“... intelligence and breadth of interest were recognised. He was a character people wished to record: Andrew Wilton’s beautifully-shaped documentary biography shows how often he amused or startled people into felicitous description. A young businessman records a meeting: I have fortunately met with a good-tempered, funny, little, elderly gentleman, who will ...”

“... which included the rue du Xavier-Privas, the Square des Missions Etrangères and the Canal Saint-Martin, had a baroque, sometimes labyrinthine character. Like the Surrealists, with their fondness for covered passageways and their vision of the city as a medieval maze, the Situationists strove for an aesthetic that subverted the organising principles of the ...”

“... would detect and track Russia’s weapons. Last September, Marillyn Hewson, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest arms manufacturer, hefted a golden shovel to break ground in Courtland, Alabama, on new facilities to develop, test and produce a variety of hypersonic weapons. By then Lockheed already had more than $3.5 billion of hypersonic ...”

“... Blair’s latest consensus hair policy, Lord Archer’s ironic, pre-penitentiary crop, the way Andrew Motion carries off his loden coat as he swirls between taxi and station platform. Julian Barnes’s novels are depilated at source, fat-free. Frisking them for a Moorcockian digression, a set of cellulite-heavy parentheses, would be like checking a tub of ...”

“... hysteria, but can only manage a rather smutty slapstick. Detectable here is the influence of Martin Amis, whose gleeful nastiness in the bedroom has become quite a touchstone for many youngish male novelists. The book is elsewhere littered with sentences that are straight Amisian repro: ‘Then there was money: it seemed money had taken a look at ...”

“... it is likely that Thomson had seen the work of Schinkel. A number of contributors, in particular Andrew Macmillan, don’t see things in quite this way, and resist any attempt to lessen the unique creative genius of their man by admitting to his being influenced. Sam McKinstry’s excellent essay shows that the final element in Thomson’s manner is the work ...”

“... ask any questions. She ate her supper and remarked at one point that the new pop star Ricky Martin looked like a fake. A director who was with us had been the subject of two of her pieces for ‘Talk of the Town’. He later told me he realised at the party that Lillian didn’t think of him as a friend. ‘In a perfectly nice way,’ he said, ‘I had ...”