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“... however, it isn’t clear how much we can read into them. Local elections in the last days of John Major’s government did, it’s true, accurately predict the outcome of the 1997 general election, but that is very unusual. In any case, comparisons between Major’s last days and the position of the present government don’t really hold up. Labour’s ...”

“... this category immediately fell the Democratic and Republican leaders of Congress, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, as well as every lawmaker closely associated with ‘intelligence oversight’ of the War on Terror: Dianne Feinstein, Mike Rogers, Lindsey Graham – here, once again, cutting across party lines. Those who praised ...”

“... a sort of soap opera hurricane. In sharp contrast to the cover, the people inside were real: Mick Kelly, who heard music in the inner room; Dr Benedict Mady Copeland, a black Marxist dying of tuberculosis who thought continually of the advancement of his people; Biff Brannon, the brusque owner of the New York Café, who sometimes wished he were a mother; the ...”

“... said to be Trump’s preferred confidant. Neither of them reads books. As Trump said to Megyn Kelly this summer, ‘I read chapters.’ Then there’s the lightning-rod figure of Steve Bannon, CEO of the Trump campaign in its late stages and formerly executive chairman of Breitbart, the tabloid website associated with the so-called alt-right. Bannon has ...”

“... News. Davies, informed by his knowledge of PR, even has a fresh angle on Alastair Campbell and the Kelly affair. In his account, ‘Campbell used it as a decoy to distract attention from a highly embarrassing story, which was emerging slowly in May and June 2003, that the long-debated Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist.’ Four weeks after the ...”

“... villages – Allingham’s versions in Suffolk, and Anthony Price’s Duntisbury Royal in Gunner Kelly – but it was Sayers who truly saw the way, and rather than trying to build such a village from scratch, simply borrowed Oxford. In so doing she mapped onto one another the hermetics of the detective story, of the dreaming spires, and (via the ...”

“... twenty years would be worth putting together in an accessible collection, as Bloodaxe has done for John Kinsella. Poems 1980-94 reprints his first eight books and some early poems. The collection is evidence of an energetic, wide-ranging spirit intent on extending several strands of Australian poetry. According to Kinsella, the meaning of the urban ...”

“... Party’s founding fathers anyway. (Both things are more or less right.) It is probably because John Smith, who led the party from July 1992 until his death in 1994, would not be prematurely enrolled in New Labour that the depiction of him here is so bleak. The man who might have led Labour to victory, thus bypassing the possibility of a Blair ...”

“... over only as a desperate jauntiness because the mood isn’t light but elegiac and, thanks to John Scogin, the 15th-century jester who haunts the book, malicious. Barker seems to identify with Scogin’s sense of humour, which is everything she wants her novel to be – disruptive, chaotic, violent, gnomic but not funny. The suspicion is that Barker has a ...”

“... secretly or openly. In the late 1470s a redeeming aspect to this brigandage was discerned by Sir John Fortescue, a former Chief Justice of the King’s Bench. Writing on the governance of England he found occasion to compare the bravery of the English and the French. The English were obviously the braver nation, he argued, because English robbers were so ...”

“... John Minton’s face is familiar – if not from the self-portrait now in the National Portrait Gallery, then from the likeness he commissioned from Lucian Freud and bequeathed to the Royal College of Art. It is very long, large-eyed, hollow-cheeked, with a receding chin and dark tousled hair. Photographs suggest that the self-portrait is a better physical likeness; the truth about his emotional state seems to lie with Lucian Freud ...”

“... Great-Aunt Jean, Cousin Jean, two small Canadian girls, their father and their mother, in a Grace Kelly hat, who broke the champagne bottle and sent the ship – splash! – into the River Carron. Then Uncle Alex took us round the miniaturised industrial world of the shipyard: the pattern-lofts, where the templates of ribs and plates were cut in plywood; the ...”

“... of the proto-Romantic feeling for the sublimity of nature that animates, say, Thomas Amory’s John Buncle, partly set in Bage’s own county of Derbyshire). What is significant is the author’s resolute provincialism – few if any early English novelists had a more confident indifference to London. That revolutionary ideas might develop in the new ...”

“... and the movie I selected, or, as a matter of fact, my daughter Tricia selected it, was Chisum with John Wayne. It was a Western. FDR was known to admire Myrna Loy and Ike to enjoy watching shoot-’em-ups; underdog Harry Truman had been inspired by Frank Capra’s 1948 State of the Union and, as the son of a sometime Hollywood mogul, Kennedy was groomed for ...”

“... There would be one more escape, in 1960. Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, Clarence and John, got away – and not one body washed up anywhere. That’s the basis for the Don Siegel film, Escape from Alcatraz (1979), in which Clint Eastwood played Morris and the warden was the late Patrick McGoohan, so famous himself as ‘The Prisoner’. There was ...”