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“... been given a second chance. Major’s unexpected victory over Kinnock provides the backdrop to David Hare’s 1993 play, The Absence of War, which Richard Seymour discussed in the last issue of the LRB. The play’s lasting appeal seems to derive from what it says about the travails of Labour in opposition, as principles contend miserably with the demands ...”

“... of recent British politics is that the SNP has seen its prospects best served by success for David Cameron. If the Tories do hold a referendum on Europe in 2017, and England votes to take Scotland out with it, another referendum on Scottish independence would be hard to resist. It might take a Machiavellian political genius to negotiate a way through ...”

“... and delivered without notes. What made it appear a triumph was the speech given the next day by David Davis, Cameron’s main rival for the Tory Party leadership and the man long considered the favourite to succeed Michael Howard. Davis flopped. He spoke woodenly from behind a lectern without any of Cameron’s natural ease, looking and sounding like ...”

“... Bears Pawpaw and Paprika, two great bears of the Egyptians of Lancashire, Chohawniskey Tem, the Witches’ County, who, when our camp plucked its tents and pulled out its maps, walked steadily with the wagons, ambling, always ambling, all across the open pages of wet England, footing as far as Pappin-eskey Tem, the flat Duck County; crossing to Curo-mengreskey Gav, the Boxers’ Town; padded on to Paub-pawnugo Tem, Apple-Water County as good for bears as for their gypsy masters, although who is master is moot after much apple-water; then to bide by Bokra-mengreskey Tem, Shepherds’ County, for their collies are trained not to bark at bears, but slyly, gently, slink, big-eyed as children behind their shepherd’s greeting ...”

“... yet does so in a jaunty tone that turns somersaults over despair. Such energy is sadly absent from David Roberts’s book The Ladies: Female Patronage of Restoration Drama, though, like Charke, Roberts is more concerned with events behind the scenes and in the auditorium than with those on the stage. Determinedly old-fashioned, this study clearly betrays its ...”

“... Palestine has less connection with the modern world than with the picturesque towns engraved by David Roberts in the 19th century. Old men still talk about their orange groves and their old stone houses in Jaffa, remembering every tree and every stone, and one doesn’t have the heart to tell them that the houses have been bulldozed and the orchards have ...”

“... writing is recognisably clean, clear and colloquial, only occasionally falling into what David Hare calls ‘the Esperanto patter of the higher mysticism’. From the start, Brook avoids ‘personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences, excesses, names of close friends, private angers, family adventures or debts of gratitude’, though there is ...”

“... year before Bonnie and Clyde; he will have been eight when Chinatown appeared, and ten or so when David Bowie recorded the song that gives this book its title. Specktor’s mother was a screenwriter whose career was short-lived; later she was a drinker who snarled at her son for asking her to stop. By then she was divorced from his father, who was a leading ...”

“... now I have taken the view that my ‘Desert Island’ book, if I were asked, would have to be David Thomson’s A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema. First published in 1970, it has just re-appeared as A Biographical Dictionary of Film in a third edition that is revised and considerably enlarged. Despite its titles it is indeed a work of ...”

“... before the levee at Holyrood, when he had worn ‘full Highland dress’, described by the painter David Wilkie as kilt and hose ‘with a kind of flesh-coloured pantaloons underneath’ and by a Lowland laird as ‘the Royal Tartan Highland dress with buff-coloured trowsers like flesh to imitate his Royal knees, and little bits of Tartan stocking like other ...”

“... Letter from Simon Callow, at last – Supermarket – Cowes. Ian Gibson’s Assassination of F.G. Lorca from library (rather disappointing). – Picked up Humphrey Carpenter’s Ezra Pound: A Serious Character unexpectedly. – Dull TV. Sunday 13: – Had made apricot mousse to follow lamb for lunch. Vin de Pays du Gard. – Napped after lunch – News ...”

“... Zhivàkos the Horseman This circle of grass needs to be sited just right – superlevel, softhard, southnorth. Horses are picky. Shires, Shetlands, they’ve attitude just like you and me. Making circus isn’t about our own people’s pleasures, not when there are beasts. Beasts come first and last. On a one to ten the horses are eleven, twelve. We’ve a camel too, scatty skutsome creature, who thinks she’s horse ...”

“... Dawn darkness is a bare blue light and there’s a sound coming at you, most likely brought on the wind from a hillside forest or nicked off the skim of the sea . . . So you’re humming that long, slow note as you broach the day, and the dogs of dawn are all one voice as you step down from your home sweet home, your tour de folie, and before you get to the other side of the gate comes a smash and clatter of wings as a thing takes flight from a point just above your head and has you pinned by joy-in-fear as its lift-off shakes from the Tree of Love and Forgetting something much like a fruit that sits, just so, in the cup of your hand, though it would take a bigger fool than you to bite into that honeyed rump, as if you hadn’t sinned enough, as if you wouldn’t have to pay your share for each day of solitude, each night when your dreams of flight and falling left you stunned ...”

“... what they want, a Democrat has to: that was his line. Hillary Clinton also backed the generals, David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal and the chief of staff Admiral Mullen, in their request for 40,000 more troops. Indeed she supported them more strongly than Gates did. Jones sought to help Obama by running interference with the Pentagon, but Obama preferred ...”

“... projectionist (‘SS-man Ellerkamp’) and the Cosmologist (a Strangelove figure set in a Caspar David Friedrich icescape) add to the richness of the texture while reinforcing the central ideal that what we are seeing is no more than a film about a film. Hitler, muses Ellerkamp, was ‘the greatest film-maker of all time’. Two principal narrators, Harry ...”