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“... There was no agenda. A cut-and-dried scheme was laid before us by the Chairman [Lord George Hamilton], and we were not asked to vote on it, only to express our opinion on half-a-dozen points ranging from the hour of luncheon to the appointment of assistant commissioners,’ who would conduct any necessary research. However, on 9 January, the diary ...”

“... These hardly weigh up against the loss of a parliamentary salary. Consider the case of Neil Hamilton, who was defeated by Martin Bell after 14 years as an MP. One of his crimes was to have lived it up in the Paris Ritz at Mohamed al-Fayed’s expense. He and his wife, Christine, stayed for six days instead of the expected two or three, ate six expensive ...”

“... 1938 if it refused to recommend Winston Churchill for election: such a decision, he said, would ‘mark the triumph of a tendency towards minute specialisation ... which I have long watched with concern, as likely to rob the Academy of its national character’. There is also a party-political reason for the intellectual’s retreat: the dispersal of the ...”

“... has opened up a space for ‘supercharged expressionism’. Unfortunately, tech titans like Mark Zuckerberg, innocent about politics to the point of cluelessness, regard themselves as enhancers of democracy, not the problem but the solution. Here Runciman identifies a cluster of developments which might, cumulatively, destroy democracy: an arcadian nerd ...”

“... that the only things that counted in politics were individuals and their personal experiences: ‘Mark well,’ he once wrote, ‘the only real happiness is that of individuals.’ Seeking to represent them as types of individual was therefore self-defeating: the best you got was a crude caricature of social diversity on the one hand, and politically isolated ...”

“... models to be imitated across the globe. ‘The true test of a good government,’ Alexander Hamilton wrote, ‘is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.’ It is a test the United States and Britain have failed ruinously during the current crisis. Both countries had weeks of warnings about the coronavirus outbreak in ...”

“... among the cognoscenti like a confederation of secret masters: Gerald Kersh, James Curtis, Mark Benney, Robert Westerby, Alexander Baron, John Lodwick, Jack Trevor Story. They have been struck from the canon, these technicians, these life-enhanced witnesses. They are noticed only by slumming journalists (who have built up their own collections of the ...”

“... store. Later in my Harrods book I read that ‘the Chairman’s love of Scotland has also left its mark on the store. To the surprise and delight of customers, kilted pipers are often to be found parading through the various departments.’ Nefertiti’s harp, sphinx Fayed, Ozymandias, and now ‘Scotland the Brave’ ... Once again, I was forced back to the ...”

“... universal consciousness from the diurnal torments of poverty, insecurity and mindless routine. Ian Hamilton Finlay’s landscapes of revolution, Edwin Morgan’s unabashed Modernism and internationalism, Sorley MacLean’s simultaneous fight for his language and for a humanist socialism. It’s not so much a matter of individual writers – and these are only ...”

“... Ian​ Hamilton once recounted in the LRB (22 October 1992) that ‘when William F. Buckley Jr sent a copy of his essays to Norman Mailer, he pencilled a welcoming “Hi, Norman!” in the index, next to Mailer’s name.’ The index discloses a lot about the nature of a book, and the passions of its author, more than is sometimes realised (‘acknowledgments’ are similarly illuminating ...”

“... in 1750, and is still continuing. An early collector of Pompeian antiquities was Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to the Court of Naples in the 1770s, whose frequent observations of the crater of the volcano were communicated to the Royal Society. Bulwer-Lytton stayed in Naples long enough to write his hugely popular romance The Last Days of Pompeii ...”

“... coast. Some edge of the golf course, out of season resort like Sheringham – where Patrick Hamilton dried out, on a regimen of no booze before lunchtime, Hopalong Cassidy novels, and the occasional glimpse from behind net curtains of schoolgirls on horseback. They should have known the real story, because it was there from the start. Staring them in ...”

“... It was clear that he was an unusually gifted newspaperman, and by the time he had made enough of a mark to be offered the editorship of the Northern Echo he had grown so ‘inordinately ambitious’ that he jumped at it. In Darlington he waged his first campaign, against pollution caused by an ICI factory, in which he received no help at all from the health ...”

“... they partially paid for – at the McManus Gallery in Dundee. Being painted by Moffat has become a mark of entry into Scotland’s intellectual pantheon, formalising Nairn’s place alongside figures like Hugh MacDiarmid, Muriel Spark and Ascherson himself. Ascherson is keen that this process of national canonisation should not become one of pacification and ...”

“... Bataille was often, as Breton remarked, an ‘excrement philosopher’.In Why Surrealism Matters, Mark Polizzotti, a biographer of Breton and translator of many Surrealist texts, makes a good case for the varied influence of the movement, especially regarding sexual politics and anticolonial struggles. He also points to its many complicities. While communists ...”