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“... researching the effects of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration for the head of the agency, Harry Hopkins; fifty years later in Britain, she watched the gap between the rich and the poor widen again, and she railed against the spirit of Thatcherism. Two days before she died, at the age of 89, she was denouncing the Clinton Administration’s plans, with ...”

“... McBride, who placed a bomb in a bar killing three women and mutilating several more, has become a guest of honour at ANC functions and is introduced to visiting foreign dignitaries as a hero of the struggle. At his trial he made a dramatic speech claiming that it was all his own fault – he had disobeyed an ANC ban on hitting soft targets. Now it is ...”

“... inside knowledge of Hearst depended on being able to show that he had been the tycoon’s guest. He had observed Marion, like Susan in the film, knocking back the booze and fiddling with a giant jigsaw puzzle, and had even taken part in those elaborate safari picnics. None of these people, nor anyone else, no letters or diaries or memoirs, make any ...”

“... have heard of my writing.’ It was no better at home. Sitting next to the wife of the guest of honour at a grand lunch Spender ‘worked rather hard at being polite’: ‘I’m afraid I’ve only heard of one Spender,’ his neighbour said, ‘Stephen Spender – and he’s dead I believe.’ ‘Well, I’m Stephen Spender,’ said Stephen ...”

“... a compliment, but Thomas Mann certainly did, and it wasn’t even addressed to him. He found it in Harry Levin’s little book on Joyce, which he read in 1944. He was also much drawn to another sentence in the same work: ‘The best writing of our contemporaries is not an act of creation, but an act of evocation, peculiarly saturated with ...”

“... Foote had been summoned to Methley to add some spice to the entertainment of a royal house guest, the stage-struck Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the younger brother of George III. It seems that Foote, in his cocksure way, had been boasting his prowess as a horseman. As some kind of test or wager he was given one of the duke’s most ...”

“... beneath his feet. Lennon’s biography is dense with careful detail. The Mailer archive at the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas is said to be the largest of the holdings in the collection, and Lennon, who was Mailer’s archivist for years, deploys the material to give us more of Mailer than we’ve had from anyone other than Mailer. He uses the journals to ...”

“... on one occasion she ‘planned to serve onions and prunes for lunch. Then she decided to invite a guest and scraped together a menu of cooked apples, canned corn, salad dressing and cocoa.’The various poetry magazines and their crowds came and went – Others, the one to which Marianne had been closest, ceased publication in 1919, so did the Egoist, but ...”

“... pay his own way.’ Uncorrupted expertise: no free bottles; no complimentary air travel; no cosy guest-rooms at Château Margaux (samples are brought to his hotel room); no chummy dinners with the countess. Parker will report on what’s in the bottle, courageously unconcerned by the reputation on the label or by the affability of the wine-maker. Interviewed ...”

“... Bygraves (‘I’ve arrived … and to prove it, I’m here!’), Tony Hancock, Gilbert Harding, Harry Secombe, Beryl Reid, Bernard Miles and Hattie Jacques, not to mention the pre-teen Julie Andrews – without ever being upstaged. In performance he would always hit the spot. The secret of his extraordinary popularity was his voice. His high-pitched giggles ...”

“... that exists between God and Allah than exists between God and the Brahma)’. The character is Harry Coomer or Hari Kumar, ground between the two worlds of the subcontinent and the English greensward. Transplanted to (or is it from?) the mother country and educated at ‘Chillingborough’ – Salman Rushdie was at Rugby and writes bitingly about the ...”

“... seducing upper-class women; and he was an unrivalled showman on the podium. His nickname, ‘Flash Harry’, was a very different soubriquet from Henry Wood’s ‘Old Timber’: a double-edged acknowledgment, not only of his celebrity, but also of what his critics regarded as his limitations. It took Sargent seven years to assert his dominance over the ...”

“... the obituary, Sam had had a late flowering and that in his nineties he had figured in one of the Harry Potter films. The obituary written by Nicholas de Jongh.14 July. I am reading as a bedside book The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell. Simply an account of the customers and the (sometimes meagre) takings of a bookshop in Wigtown in Scotland, it’s ...”

“... would go on to grammar school as a matter of course. The most interesting of the participants is Harry Ognall, now a judge, who is pictured going through the old buildings of the empty (because translated to the outskirts) Leeds Grammar School and remarking that he thinks there is less class distinction at the school than there was in his day. My brief visit ...”

“... sales-ledger terms it was his starry apotheosis.Working the road in the 1930s and 1940s with the Harry James and Tommy Dorsey bands, Sinatra acquired a lot of jazz life knowledge by osmosis. (Jazz inflections peppered his speech for the rest of his life: ‘I’ve known discouragement, despair and all those other cats.’) He learned what not to do: how to ...”