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“... expect people to remember exactly what you said, or the details of your message’). Cost is George Steiner dedicating his anthology of poetry translations, Poem to Poem, to his mother, ‘who spoke six languages, in her own fashion’. It is the inability to manage with what Costa calls ‘orderly mixing’, a lightly mocking and blissfully confidential ...”

“... modern world where the ordinariness of crime and unhappiness, or the fact of their frequency, in George Eliot’s phrase, is their most telling feature. We have to guess at a lot of this, since this stately, beautiful film keeps indulging in the favourite temptation of real movie-makers: excessive trust in the image. The police chief dominates the early part ...”

“... seem deluded, trapped in a happy end they can’t want. The characters are Alex and Katherine, George Sanders and Ingrid Bergman. They have come to Italy to sell a property they have inherited from the person they call Uncle Homer, a man who appears to have had the gift for enjoying himself that they so conspicuously lack. The property is a house near ...”

“... There is another question on which I am out of line, this time in disagreement with my old friend Michael Foot. Five 20th-century prime ministers and one non-premier (Joseph Chamberlain) have statues in the lobby of the House of Commons: Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill and Attlee. The inclusion of Joseph ...”

“... which he was given surreptitious access.Printed with the article was a photograph which Professor George Steiner had, in conversation with me, treated as proof of Wittgenstein’s taste for ‘rough trade’. The picture shows Wittgenstein walking down the street with a young man wearing a black raincoat. It was originally published in Wittgenstein: Sein ...”

“... SO15 counterterrorism unit. Some of the stories obtained this way were trivial, though intrusive: George Michael wept in his jail cell, for example, or a male British Airways worker secretly wore high heels. Others were more serious: security lapses at Heathrow, or equipment shortages in Afghanistan. Almost anything could be obtained if the offer was big ...”

“... historical blur) often with great vividness. The three men, Thomas Evans, Robert Wedderburn and George Cannon, were affiliated with ultra-radicalism and Spence before the letter’s death in 1814 – though Cannon, almost a generation younger than the others, was a late arrival. The first part of Dr McCalman’s study looks at the preparatory stages of the ...”

“... This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after his ...”

“... its distance from himself’. The second word is ‘entrepreneur’, a quiet enough stranger until George W. Bush told us the French didn’t have a word for it. ‘The anecdote … suggested that many, in the English-speaking world, turn to French much more than they would like to think they do.’The book has two parts, ‘Mixings’ and ...”

“... all right. Enabling, I think they call it. Diana Melly begins her story, subtitled ‘Life with George’ (already, I’m afraid, looking around for justification) with the information that in 1961, when she met George Melly, she was 24, married to her second husband and had two children, Patrick aged six, and ...”

“... a menu of ‘Primary Colors Specials’, including Lasagne di Paul Begalanese and Pork Chop George Stephen-applesauce. There’s a copy prominently displayed in the new books section of the White House library, and 742,000 have been shipped to bookstores to meet the demand. It’s number one on the New York Times bestseller list; North American ...”

“... working with most of the best Hollywood directors of the time: Hawks, Zinnemann, William Wyler, George Stevens, Hitchcock. In ten or so of his 17 films, he is, by anybody’s reckoning, flawless. It’s not surprising that John Ford never showed an interest; the ‘manly’ directors with whom Clift did work suspected he was gay, and, in John Huston’s ...”

“... history. Corbyn is probably unique in his lack of conventional qualifications for the job. George Lansbury and Michael Foot, the former Labour leaders he most resembles, had been cabinet ministers; Foot was Callaghan’s deputy in the 1976-79 government. Corbyn’s lack of conventional qualifications, however, is the ...”

“... in Grey’s career is the one which receives the least adequate treatment. The period between George IV’s death in 1830 and the passing of the Reform Act two years later occupies 24 of Dr Smith’s pages, by contrast with 133 of Trevelyan’s. No one could give an adequate account of the Reform struggle from the Prime Minister’s viewpoint within ...”

“... balanced judgments and informed good sense. There is hardly a harsh word about anyone – not even George Brown, who sometimes committed the ultimate sin (though Roll does not mention this) of bawling him out in front of his juniors. What the book lacks is a bit of seasoning, a sense of blood on the floor. One misses the rumbustious ebullience, the fire in the ...”