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“... very start of the World Cup, questions of personal rig-out seemed to be of central consequence. David Beckham’s Jean Paul Gaultier sarong, plus his newly blonde-streaked looks, may well have had something to do with Glenn Hoddle’s less than friendly treatment of him in England’s opening games. And this treatment may in turn have led to Beckham’s ...”

“... than his two predecessors, but he did not have enough time, and never looked anything like a winner. As a result of Tory inadequacy, Labour won easily in 2005 and although the Conservatives gained 33 new MPs they achieved almost exactly the same percentage of the total votes cast –33 per cent – as they had done in 2001. There was some excuse for Tory ...”

“... too, refuse to call the islands Falklands. But this is not the first time that the Nobel Prize-winner of 1982 has lied in print, and not only in the banana republic of his fiction. He lies about any subject that takes his fancy. On Sundays he dissipates his boredom by writing his weekly column and sending it over to Madrid. In Spanish the words column and ...”

“... founded the Memorial, became ‘the most important figure in Chesterton’s life’, according to David Baker in Ideology of Obsession: A.K. Chesterton and British Fascism. The two met when Chesterton went to interview Flower, ‘whose reign over Stratford-upon-Avon came as near absolutism as made no odds’. Flower was impressed by Chesterton’s refusal to ...”

“... presence was that of a hellfire preacher, turning a providential vision into an election winner. And he knew what he was doing as well as any spin-doctor. He realised that he was a performer, playing to the public. He was a true professional who acknowledged that, whether he felt like it or not, he must ‘put on the steam perforce’. His steam ...”

“... on in interviews with ‘His Excellency’ by Bob Astles. Long after the publication in 1974 of David Martin’s General Amin might have been expected to bring some constraint, Fleet Street went on with the joke – spiced as it was with prurient pleasure in a wickedness hard to credit, completely, in the security of somewhere far away across the world. The ...”

“... have been voting in fixed patterns set by age, race, gender, income and educational level, and the winner in the different contests has been determined by the way these different groups are divided up within and between state boundaries. Anyone who knows how to read the census data (and that includes some of the smart, tech-savvy types around Obama) has had a ...”

“... relevant management skills. Steven Chu, the secretary of energy in Obama’s first term, was the winner of a Nobel Prize in physics, but he promulgated without complaint the ‘all of the above’ energy policy, which included, with ecumenical indifference, nuclear power, deep-sea drilling, Arctic drilling, and fracking. Kathleen Sebelius, the secretary of ...”

“... preferred William Hague, who should not even have stood that time round, let alone have been the winner. As the Conservative Party in the country clearly favoured Clarke, the Parliamentary Party’s gratuitous act of unilateral leadership disarmament was, so far as I know, the only occasion in the 20th century when either the Conservative or the Labour Party ...”

“... be depressingly more expensive than the best novelist.) Only once, with John Berger in 1972, has a winner been graceless enough to allude publicly to the source of the prize-money in black men’s sweat. Booker judges change every year and the one stable element is Martyn Goff, the éminence grise of the panel which chooses the judges. Ever since his earlier ...”

“... people trying to ‘adopt’ Coe. Television viewers can see the process at work in the person of David Coleman, who maintains, on camera, what comes across as a flirtatiously bantering relationship with ‘Seb’. Coe may be inured to it by now, but as his book records, he has been embarrassed in the past: ‘To cap it all, [Frank] Bough had signed off the ...”

“... The moment was late in 1970, at the Travellers’ Club in London, during a supper for 14 people. David Brower, the saint of eco-sanity from the Sierra Club in California, had just given a sermon, a hell-fire variant of the one geologists have used for a century or more: rocks are long, life is short, who do we think we are? Brower’s homily – which the ...”

“... no longer directly control the finances of performance. In fact, opera has always functioned as a winner-take-all economy. The Royal Academy of Music was plunged into financial crisis almost from the moment of its inception in 1719 by the extravagant demands of Europe’s best opera singers (the Italian castrato Nicolini charged eight hundred guineas a ...”

“... pensioner? Didn’t cinephiles deserve a more mercurial model, made in their lifetime? But the new winner was Vertigo, not very much younger than Citizen Kane, and its triumph was acknowledged as a rueful commentary on the ambivalent glory of being a film director, the auteur status that Sight & Sound was pledged to uphold. Already, in 2012, Hitchcock was ...”

“... education company called the Blended Learning Enhancement Project. They have a pair of twins, David and Lisa, the latter of whom spends much of the novel in a coma after Fraz drops her while spinning her around, leading to another of Lipsyte’s recurring scenes of panic and heartache at the side of a hospital bed. As in The Ask, there’s a portrait of a ...”