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“... played Miss Marple’, is present. Also namechecked are Patricia Hodge, Simon Russell Beale, Giles Gordon (once Moorcock’s literary agent), Andrea Dworkin and Iris Murdoch, who ‘sat smiling into the middle-distance while Felix Martin explained the H-bomb to her’. What Moorcock is doing, under the permission of a work of fiction, is contriving a ...”

“... as fifty of them at a time, on the floors of damp and freezing tar-boiling sheds in the middle of winter. By 1940 lascars made up more than a quarter of the Merchant Navy. A large proportion of them came from the Sylhet area of what is now Bangladesh. They had the lowliest jobs. They were engine-room hands: bunkermen who stuffed coal into the ...”

“... of a maddening case of dermatitis.) Maybe because my psoriasis has flared up so badly this past winter – every morning when I woke up in San Diego I discovered a drift of huge white flakes on the pillowcase – I have developed an unwholesome interest in the epidermal problems of historical figures. My mother says my skin ailments are identical to ...”

“... a Scottish heritage, with a military ancestor boasting the glory of having been killed alongside Gordon in the Battle of Khartoum. Although Saxon and raised in Leipzig, he knows holidays in Rome as well as summers in East Prussia. Martin’s natural father had been a world-famous orchestra conductor (and sometime composer – in Proustian fashion, we owe the ...”

“... to concoct it. Tony Blair has repeatedly insisted that the diplomatic manoeuvres of the autumn and winter of 2002-03 were not intended to serve as a pretext for armed intervention in the spring, but were genuine attempts to avoid their use of force by persuading Saddam to disarm peacefully. It is not possible to demonstrate that this is a lie, but it remains ...”

“... such statistics all too vivid. Eight months after D Day, one company of the 2nd Battalion of the Gordon Highlanders had just three men left out of the 115 who had landed in Normandy. But desertion and ‘combat exhaustion’ were rare as British troops in this sector moved through the Reichswald on Germany’s border with Holland. This was perhaps because ...”

“... principally for their skill at chess. One of them, another Kingsman, was Alan Turing, who, with Gordon Welchman of Sidney Sussex, was foremost among those who decoded Ultra, encyphered on the Enigma machine, and, perhaps more than any single person, helped to save us from defeat in the battle of the Atlantic. When suddenly Japanese linguists had to be ...”

“... desired to escape. The regime under which I grew up reserved the cinema for two sorts of occasion: winter, and rainy afternoons. Winter came round with its own relentlessness, and it began on the day when the clothes I had been wearing for the past few months (aertex shirts, khaki shorts, cotton underpants) were, without any ...”

“... the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was deep and dangerous. Like many of their kind, they never quite put it behind ...”

“... school holidays I saw more of her: we’d go frequently to Wembley Pool in the summer and in the winter she’d take me with her to the West End once a week, to shopping at Selfridges and tea at the Cumberland or the Regent Palace, often together with some gentleman friend. In the evening she’d go out to the pictures or the theatre or a whist drive or a ...”

“... for the music. When, at the end, he simply thanked everyone and announced a forthcoming series of winter concerts, he unleashed what one journalist described as ‘an almost hysterical outburst from the packed crowd’. Writing soon after in the Radio Times, Sargent described the promenaders’ antics as being no more than a ‘mild rag’. Nevertheless, the ...”

“... or Edwardian toy butchers’ shops. They’re bigger and grander than the one Dad made for Gordon and me c.1940 but whereas these joints are nailed into place, Dad’s were all made to unhook so we could serve them to our imaginary customers at the counter. 25 February. A propos civil liberties the government spokesperson most often put ...”

“... it (‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about,’ Gordon Brown was still quipping in the LRB in 1989). The Leninists to the left of Labour, meanwhile, were looking at history as a ‘series of repeats’ – crisis, general strike, Winter Palace, here we come – although ...”

“... sociopath. In ‘Elements of Anti-Style’, McLaren recalled the weeks he spent in New York in the winter of 1978 trying to help Vicious beat the rap for Spungen’s death. ‘I’m still not entirely sure why: maybe because I felt that there was no one more fun than Sid. He never saw a red light; he saw only green. He was chaos incarnate, and he made my blood ...”

“... of me: I’ve made my two great discoveries – the religious about 4 years ago, the other in the winter of 1902 … I may sit year after year in my pretty sitting room, watching things grow more unreal, because I’m afraid of being remarked.’ ‘The other’ – that he was himself ‘other’ sexually – was not a happy recognition for someone ...”