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“... in 1964. Suu Kyi’s student years are among the best documented and the most entertaining to read about. She represented a type which is forgotten in conventional reminiscence of the 1960s: passionate, idealistic, but determinedly and almost aggressively chaste in the face of new fashions in sexual liberation. Her college, St Hugh’s, was, in the words ...”

“... years.’ Hence these are to be seen as ‘the diaries of a socialist-in-the-making’. What they read like, however, are the diaries of an effective politician on the make. Benn would certainly acknowledge as much. So far from seeking to disguise it, he makes clear that he is presenting his diaries as a grim moral tale. This places the reader in a ...”

“... allowed to infest the throne-room, Morris develops a mild form of megalomania. It is ghastly to read him when he takes credit for leaving the Bosnians to their fate, or for covering up for Boris Yeltsin, or for liberating Haiti, or for building a bridge (to coin a phrase) to Richard Nixon. It is ghastlier still to reflect ...”

“... without dates). The stripped-down nature of the book makes for a pleasantly uninterrupted read. But it means that one can never be sure to what extent Morpurgo is merely retailing, and to what extent he has properly sifted, hearsay, insider’s gossip, lore, legend and the embroidered accounts which flourish in the book trade around characters like ...”

“... Reagan is a man who is at ease. Such judgments flow easily from the commentators. Take the case of Richard Nixon. He is described as having been simply a politician, a pure politician without principle other than that of acquiring and hanging on to office. But how does this explain his reactions when he is in office? Then we are told that he is an example of ...”

“... of large ambitions. He showed how a writer was to capture the attention of a society that didn’t read. What an ambitious young writer in 1948 could be counted on not to notice was the way in which Hemingway had already become a prisoner of his own legend. Mailer actually appropriated the old man’s metaphor of writing as an on-going pugilistic competition ...”

“... Have you read Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol? In its own way this is an enlightening book and I like the manner in which the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s like a modern memorandum or a press release. Young Glen, though he can’t be so young today, had a good ghost writer in Pete Silverton ...”

“... on 22 October 1927, Virginia Woolf was surprised that HGW’s ‘typewritten sheets’ were read by ‘a shaggy, shabby old scholar’, T.E. Page. In 1981, Niall Rudd wrote a short biography of the scholar and controversialist, who taught classics at Charterhouse, was once seen by Osbert Lancaster accompanying Lady Asquith down Bond St, and died a ...”

“... In 1979, in a preface to a new edition of Yeats: The Man and the Masks, Richard Ellmann wrote about 46 Palmerston Road in Rathmines in Dublin, where George Yeats lived between her husband’s death in 1939 and her own death almost thirty years later. Mrs Yeats lived, Ellmann wrote, among the dead poet’s papers. ‘There in the bookcases was his working library, often heavily annotated, and in cabinets and file cases were all his manuscripts, arranged with care … She was very good at turning up at once some early draft of a poem or play or prose work, or a letter Yeats had received or written ...”

“... important found no place in the novel’s scheme. Towards the end of the book the hero read in his Penguin Marcus Aurelius the gloomy aphorism that human life is no more than sperm and ashes, and felt no sympathy for it. The modest richness of his day refuted this downbeat Roman smugness. A highly mannered style seems to achieve its effects almost ...”

“... predeceased his sister by some 35 years. As a long-ago anarchist, libertarian, hippie (etc) I’d read a bit of Nietzsche, but it’s true that I knew nothing about the Nietzsche Archive and wasn’t even aware that he had a sister. Unfortunately, Diethe, though she has clearly spent a working life in the Nietzsche Archive, is unable to organise or present ...”

“... there is Oliver, his best friend but in many ways his opposite: louche, sexy, camp, cultured – Richard E. Grant to Stuart’s Paul McGann. Oliver teaches at an iffy language school off the Edgware Road. He is into opera, food, wine, the imperatives of good taste. He uses the word ‘crepuscular’ a lot, and speaks in a froth of polyglot ...”

“... all to hear: ‘Oh, do get a move on, you silly old pongers!’ Or the one about John Barrymore as Richard III, after a heavy pub-crawl with his co-star Wilfred Lawson, making such a hash of his opening soliloquy that a member of the audience called out. ‘You’re drunk!’– on which Barrymore approached the footlights and conspiratorially replied: ‘Just ...”

“... the lower and upper shelves of dimly lit cases like the dusty bottles and books no one is going to read which clutter high places in theme pubs. The perfunctoriness of some of the labels here (where and when was the bird collected? What does the inscription say?) indicates that the history of the objects themselves is not quite the point.The character of the ...”

“... as any on which to hang thoughts about Philip Guston is San Clemente, painted in 1975. It shows Richard Nixon on the Californian shore. His pink, phallic nose droops between gross, grey, stubbled testicular cheeks. A tear runs down one of them. Bloodshot eyes swivel from under a black hedge of eyebrow. He looks back and down towards his ...”