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“... short-lived secretaries of state for war (Joseph Godber and James Ramsden). Within a year Harold Wilson’s incoming Labour government had abolished the post altogether, amalgamating its duties into the Ministry of Defence. Profumo killed off his job at the same time that he was destroying his own career. What Profumo always had going for him as war ...”

“... need to remember that his time coincided roughly with that of American candidates such as Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling, and special allowance might have to be made for the senses in which Cyril Connolly was ‘influential’ or George Orwell a ‘man of letters’. But I would be surprised if any serious contender for that title between about 1930 and ...”

“... It may be that a partnership between art and sickness is a trademark of High Modernism, as Edmund Wilson argued in The Wound and the Bow. But if so, Lawrence wanted to be in a different business. Modernist sickness is more likely to be neurasthenia or hypochondria than the real thing, and to Lawrence, such sickness represents the fatal flaw of the modern ...”

“... The third best-protected species is the great white, described approvingly here by E.O. Wilson as ‘one of the four or five last great predators of humanity’. Eilperin, an environmental reporter for the Washington Post, has travelled the world trying to understand sharks and human interactions with them. She has swum with reef sharks in the ...”

“... the proletarian sex-class. ‘Socialist’ feminism, on the other hand, was more typical of Harold Wilson’s Britain, with its relatively powerful labour movement and bustling Marxist far left. Rowbotham had been a member of the Labour Party and the International Socialists, and worked with members of the International Marxist Group. Campbell was then a ...”

“... of Proust: Gide’s observation reminds us that it is pointless to get so worked up – as Edmund Wilson did – about Proust’s dogmas on love, jealousy or sex. These are indeed not intended to prove anything. We come to accept them, surely, as bees in the bonnet of an old friend, for it is one of the last secrets of Proust’s art … that the ...”

“... had experienced group sex at Sandstone, the quasi-intentional community founded by John and Barbara Williamson in Topanga Canyon, California. Up to twenty people lived there, hosting regular parties on Wednesday and Saturday nights at which attendees (mainly couples, who paid to be members of the club) could have sex with whomever they liked. The ...”

“... flint churches. Philip Larkin (sans bicycle clips) with a Byronic makeover. Larkin reimagined by Barbara Cartland, all scowls and flashing coattails, piercing glances. This wholesome, outdoorsy Englishness, bracing weather and privatised mayhem between consenting adults, has a tendency to thrive at times of social unrest. There’s nothing like a good hunger ...”

“... is the so much more brazen, upfront way it puts this on display. One of my favourite moments was Barbara Taylor Bradford renewing her marriage vows in the total privacy of a completely deserted tropical island on which no tourists step; with only black luggage carriers in attendance , as well as the whole photographic and editorial team of Hello!. (She said ...”

“... it. This made her an unusual Conservative. It also caused some of her opponents to misjudge her. Barbara Castle, who consistently both admired Thatcher and underestimated her, supported her Private Members’ Bill in 1960 on the grounds that it could only aid the Labour Party in the long run. ‘It is always the progressive movements which are supporters of ...”

“... in English Literature at Berkeley. While still at college, she wrote an article on the architect Wilson Wurster that won Vogue’s Prix de Paris award. That took her to New York in 1956. It was the first time she had been there, and she was wearing ‘a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old ...”

“... the survivors, had prepared me for this. In Corso’s hutch, his minders begged for copies of Barbara Pym, while Gregory spoke wistfully of Philip Larkin. Denton Welch was William Burroughs’s main intellectual squeeze. Ferlinghetti had high hopes for Jeremy Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of ...”

“... the ranks of inscribed black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a ...”

“... embarrass yourself. You get the distinct feeling Kelley disapproves of Sinatra’s fourth wife, Barbara, because she insisted on giving millions rather than thousands to certain charities, such as a programme for sexually abused children. A lose-lose situation: keep your money to yourself and you’re pilloried as the unfeeling rich; spend all your time ...”

“... recognised by contemporaries: ‘one of the great minds and imaginations of our day’, Edmund Wilson wrote in the 1920s, ‘absolutely comparable’ to ‘the Nietzsches, the Tolstoys, the Wagners and the Ibsens of a previous generation’.All literary magnitudes are finite. In the case of great writers, it is understandable that their vices should ...”