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“... politicians are turned into actors. They have got to choose an image, and then ‘project’ it. Michael Foot insisted on looking like what he is – ‘the corduroy, the wool tie, the academic’s white hair’ – and was duly run off the court by ‘the warrior queen ... her hair lacquered into Britannia’s golden helmet’. In modern times, York ...”

“... but their power is the greater for that: coming at the end of a description of weather over Black Combe (a recurrent point de repère of the book), they are a formal act of conclusion and interpretation which refuses to interpret. Again and again this is the pattern: the creative energy of the poems is channelled into description, and the wisdom of the ...”

“... them into models of market behaviour, price volatility, risk profiles, portfolio theory and the Black-Scholes formula for pricing derivatives. Lecturing at MIT and Harvard raised Mandelbrot’s profile and the possibility of a professorship at one or the other, but nothing was offered and he returned to the comfortable world of IBM. He went to ...”

“... gaps, between urban workers and suburban professionals, between rich and poor, between white and black and Latino. By his willingness to change and to transcend the standard political categories, Tye’s Kennedy could have become America’s ‘high priest of reconciliation’. The seventh of the nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, he grew up in an ...”

“... them hysterical letters in the 1840s, trying to radicalise them about the Irish famine. This time, Michael Collins visits Kilneagh, as a friend. The Troubles come. The house is burnt and Willie Quinton’s father is killed with his dogs and servants, not by Irishmen resenting his English connections, but by Black and Tans ...”

“... tanks didn’t counsel prudence. In the run-up to the war, RUSI’s director of military science, Michael Codner (King’s via the US Naval War College in Rhode Island), described it as ‘an intervention of choice designed to make the world on balance a safer and better place’. Britain was involved, Codner wrote, because ‘one of successive British ...”

“... emperor. At last Coetzee has found his protagonist. Three months into the writing, Steve Biko, the black-consciousness leader, died in prison in Pretoria after torture. Torture now becomes a central element in Coetzee’s plot. The magistrate meets a torture victim; he himself will be a victim of torture. ‘This may not be entirely honest,’ Coetzee ...”

“... in her hostility to Europe, much the same applies to the campaign currently being waged by what Michael Heseltine calls ‘our North American press’ – that is to say, the Murdoch and Black empires – against Britain forging closer ties in Europe. As Conrad Black has lived here for ...”

“... Edward Crankshaw and C.A. Lejeune, a socially and intellectually glamorous world, particularly to Michael Frayn, one of a group of us who went to the exhibition. But, of course, London itself was beginning to seem glamorous then – the Coffee House in Northumberland Avenue, the Soup Kitchen in Chandos Place, films at the Academy on Oxford Street and suppers ...”

“... which endured down to and beyond the moment I first glimpsed it in wartime: a city of mourning-black temples whose columns and arches were wrapped in inky, velvety fur. Who under fifty, knowing only this golden-scrubbed city centre, can imagine that?) Evelyn’s idea of a cure was to drive smoky industries out of London and surround the town with a ...”

“... and drove him to fits of remorse. ‘I hope a letter is not too melodramatic,’ he writes to Michael and Edna Longley, after a perceived early failure to be an advocate for poetry in the North: ‘It is not so much in the hope of redressing any hurt as to allay my own embarrassment and guilt. As usual your attitude has been gracious and gentle in the ...”

“... than perfect partner because he was a homosexual. Berkeley had to deal with the two Cyrils – Black and Osborne – who were the Commons equivalents of Kilmuir and Dilhorne. Black was a Methodist lay preacher; Sir Cyril Osborne, a self-made businessman, informed the Commons that he had been ‘brought up as a Victorian ...”

“... with more than the usual leavening of colonial Frenchness’. Then, shouldering a handbag ‘of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay’, she steels herself for a mind-blowing trip to the pullulating ‘logo-maze’ of Harvey Nichols. Cayce – pronounced ‘Case’, not ‘Casey’ – is a spectacularly talented, unerringly prescient branding ...”

“... a friend sneaked me into the Unprofor headquarters in a villa in the centre of town. General Michael Rose was away in Pale, we were told, negotiating with the Serbs. We were shown into a bedroom, now used as Rose’s private office. A Royal Marine sat back in the general’s chair, feet on the desk, his head hidden behind a thick book. The book was ...”

“... a second-hand copy of V.R. Lang: Poems & Plays, with a Memoir by Alison Lurie. The cover sports a black and white photograph of Lang looking soulful in a harlequin costume – a picture presumably taken during one of her performances for the Poets’ Theatre of Cambridge.Lurie’s memoir recreates the fervent excitement around the activities of this ...”