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“... Macdonald’s early and mindless attitude to the Jews, I find it impossible to read his notice of Ben Hur and the other Biblical pseudo-epics as the outcome of bigotry. (Ought there to be such a term as ‘Jew-teasing’? It would meet this case, though it might get one into trouble.) At any rate, and despite the use of slightly cheap terms such as ...”

“... au Magistrat’, though without saying where or when. I am grateful to the sharp eyes of Andrew Wilson, who spotted the Mountjoy reference by chance (or by alphabetical serendipity: he was researching a family ancestor called Merryweather) and kindly shared it with me. The story, such as it can be reconstructed, is contained in two sets of court ...”

“... administration. The financial crisis-fighting of Hank Paulson as Bush’s Treasury secretary and Ben Bernanke at the Fed relied on the Democrats for congressional support. Elite leadership of the Republican Party collapsed. John McCain chose the shockingly unqualified Sarah Palin as a running mate in the 2008 election because she was hugely popular with the ...”

“... premiere of The Rake’s Progress – one finds that the boon-companions were Peter Bartok, Edmund Wilson, Fritz Reiner, Rudolph Bing, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Paco Lagerstrom, Auden, Kallman, Balanchine and Lincoln Kirstein. Stravinsky was, however, saddled at this time as on several occasions with the chaotic if aristocratic poet Edward James (whose laugh Craft ...”

“... situation was very different, although economic expertise was no panacea for success: both Harold Wilson and Edward Heath were far more aware of the economic problems of their time than Eden was of those in his. Yet neither was able to do much to solve them. Eden’s life spanned the years between the heyday of Britain’s imperial grandeur and her ...”

“... any support.’ ‘I respect faith, but doubt gets you an education,’ the playwright and conman Wilson Mizner once said. This was certainly true of Mitchell who, from an early age, doubted the authority of her parents. ‘Their judgment was so sucky all the time.’ As a toddler she had a recurring nightmare of her father losing control of the car. ‘These ...”

“... it can easily be sublimated into simple lifestyle politics. In the New Yorker last year, Jennifer Wilson wrote about the appearance of polyamory in a host of recent books, films, podcasts and TV series, and remarked that a lot of it looks like ‘the rich using non-monogamy as a vaccine against an expensive divorce’. Back to Comfort’s ‘adulterous ...”

“... the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this won’t really do. You can’t ignore half a career, or the political and literary traditions which shaped the whole of it. Unlike Wells, say, Kipling is not a latecomer to the ...”

“... within a hero by turning, for instance, Tony Blair MP into ‘I’m Tory Plan B’ or Harold Wilson into ‘Lord Loinwash’. He gives my edition of the Sonnets some genial stick for emphasising their oral and performative aspects (I was just trying to get people to read them), rather than dwelling on how their letters dance into different visible forms ...”

“... nor did it leave a ripple on the surface of local political thought in Baghdad,’ Arnold Wilson, the civil commissioner in Baghdad, reported to the Foreign Office after a meeting with a group of Iraqi Jewish notables. Palestine, they had said, ‘is a poor country and Jerusalem a bad town to live in’: Compared with Palestine, Mesopotamia was ...”

“... Histories: and I am thinking here of basic studies of the 1940s and 50s, like Dover Wilson’s The Fortunes of Falstaff, or useful popular books like Tillyard’s on Shakespeare’s History Plays.These early studies, with their monarchical interests, tended to be strongly conservative in their attitudes. They worked to defend the rejection of ...”

“... people thought that there was something too convenient about the Lusitania for President Woodrow Wilson, and too easy about Pearl Harbour for President Franklin Roosevelt – both of these, incidentally, hypotheses which later Churchill historians are finding harder to dismiss – but such arguments had been subsumed in the long withdrawing roar of American ...”

“... daughter, Harriet, Lowell began seeing a young poetry student who looked, according to Edmund Wilson, ‘like a Renoir’. On one occasion, the girl played hostess at their house in Boston, while Hardwick retreated upstairs to cry. Bishop cut short a visit in the summer of 1947 after Lowell began declaring that he was in love with her. When the couple ...”

“... opened in New York where Dudley alternated at the piano with Teddy (‘Fly Me to the Moon’) Wilson. But knowing nothing of its history or development and never having listened to it much, I was baffled and bored by jazz, while Jonathan Miller’s experience of it didn’t stretch much beyond undergraduate hops where it served as a background to his ...”

“... Out Chaplin, passed out, is hauled along the sidewalk by the scruff of his coat by staggering Ben Turpin. His toes trail; he is as supine as a sled. Turpin himself is so drunk he can hardly drag him. Chaplin comes quietly to, realises how well he is being served by his struggling pal, and with a royally delicate gesture plucks and savours a flower. By ...”