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“... as a gentle caper comedy, but wrapped up inside this genre piece is a powerful fantasy of escape. Stanley Holloway and Alec Guinness, the film’s partners in crime, are at heart romantics and dreamers chafing to break free from the conventions of postwar Britain in all its drabness, austerity and repression, and Continental Europe provides the closest escape ...”

“... of Mansfield’s ‘wife’, the ever-devoted Ida Baker whom Mansfield referred to variously as ‘Jones’, ‘the Mountain’ and ‘the slave’, whom she said often she hated and once said she thought of shooting with her revolver, and whom she would not allow to touch her. This modern ‘we know better’ tone in dealing with the elderly survivors seems ...”

“... new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was a spectacularly sporty school. The headmaster, Stanley Harris, had captained England at football and was also a distinguished cricketer and rugby player. Lancaster, an only child who had lost his father two years earlier at the Battle of the Somme, proved himself as the terms came and went to be uniformly ...”

“... oddness of some of the president’s other appointments and his treatment of them. General James Jones, whom Obama had never met, was asked to become national security adviser. Once chosen, he hardly ever saw the president alone. To head the CIA Obama picked Leon Panetta, a former congressman who had served as Bill Clinton’s chief of staff. Panetta was a ...”

“... kind known to Villiers de l’Isle Adam. Fewer jewels. Excellent use is made of the text of Tom Jones, but it would be less easy to tell that the writer had done his stint of teaching English literature at university level. The voice of the novelist is heard continually through the speech of his characters. Patrick is a lord of language, as he was in the ...”

“... continued decline in our belief in William of Stratford’. Nicholas Shrimpton, D.A.N. Jones and others are cited in such a way as to make them suggest that, when not translating the 46th Psalm, Shakespeare was copying Paley’s papers. Burgess and his reviewers may resent their conscription into the anti-Stratford camp, but the company is ...”

“... that the Buddha was a Negro. Various British residents in India, including the great Sir William Jones, discoverer of the Indo-European language roots, echoed this: the Buddha had the nose and lips and the ‘crisp and woolly’ hair of Africans. (Others thought that the curls on the Buddha’s head were snails.) Athanasius Kircher, whose name is always ...”

“... as Mary’s dowry, and how much he promised to bequeath to her and her husband at his death. As Stanley Wells summarises the affair in the general introduction to the Oxford edition of Shakespeare, ‘in 1604 Shakespeare was lodging in north London with a Huguenot family called Mountjoy; in 1612 he was to testify in a court case relating to a marriage ...”

“... are times when anorexia functions in Lost for Words as schizophrenia does for Kingsley Amis in Stanley and the Women, countersubject outranking the subject, the ballast that almost sinks the ship. It’s at the moment when a literary sensibility seems confounded by reality, with Vanessa’s reflections on the vicious purity of her daughter’s desire to ...”

“... now facilely grouped as a cetacean school of Great White Males (Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, John Updike, Saul Bellow, Gore Vidal, J.D. Salinger, Joseph Heller, the recently retired Philip Roth), whose ghostly father and bearded Neptune disturbing the liquor cabinet deep into the night was Ernest Hemingway. Even those least influenced by ...”

“... and singers, are not alive, but some were available to be spoken to. Protégés of hers such as Stanley Baxter never heard her accuse McCulloch. One of her ‘young artists’ said: ‘She would have been at pains to shelter us from any hint of such a thing.’ When Simpson reported her remarks to his boss, the man rounded on him and told him he was an ...”

“... been somebody Welsh, as the evening had a strong Celtic flavour, the film being The Criminal with Stanley Baker. What I did not know, but presumably she did, was that this was the day Burton had chosen to announce his divorce from Sibyl. It followed that her companion had to be chosen with care, had not to be someone with whom Sybil could conceivably be ...”

“... Interests for April 1994 shows the former whip and foreign office minister Tristan Garel-Jones to be an adviser to British Gas, the Union Bank of Switzerland and the civil engineering group Biwater International. David Mellor has amassed 12 paid consultancies since resigning from office, including Racal Tacticom, Ernst and Young, Short ...”

“... in order to offset the desiccating effect of the documentary record. Katherine Duncan-Jones describes a bit of a shark in Ungentle Shakespeare (2001), and is very good at extracting plausible matter even from Aubrey’s anecdotes. She also adds lively and often credible dashes of speculation of her own, such as the suggestion that Shakespeare and ...”

“... endeavour emerge from a seventy-page party scene in The Recognitions. The tortured composer Stanley talks about ‘living among palimpsests … double and triple palimpsests pile up and you keep erasing, and altering, and adding, always trying to account for this accumulation, to order it, to locate every particle in its place in one whole’. He feels ...”