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“... grave to cradle.’ 6 April. Were there a suitable forum I would put in my own word for Dennis Stevenson, currently being pilloried with his colleagues for the collapse of HBOS. In the early 1990s when I was a trustee of the National Gallery Stevenson was a trustee of the Tate and must have seen me arriving at one or ...”

“... is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious chefs – and to his and Gill’s generation of restaurant critics, the transgressive has become familiar. He’s not unaware of this, of course, and so, for the first time in his career, tries to ...”

“... mark is all over this novel, not just in the muscular, shouldering prose style – the style of John Self – but in Ripley’s rich tangle of adolescent preoccupations, his Charles Highway-like obsession with bodily products (‘matutinal lungbung’ in particular), with his own appearance (‘My tasty eyes ... Much is the womanly bullshit that has been ...”

“... Democratic politics since 1960, when, at the age of twelve, he sported a large campaign button for John F. Kennedy. Until recently he was a co-editor of Dissent, which prides itself on being the nation’s oldest democratic socialist magazine. His previous books include The Populist Persuasion (1995), an illuminating analysis which predated the recent ...”

“... operators to space warfighters’. But the vice chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, John E. Hyten, has described space war as ‘inevitable’.The American strategeion sees itself as waging a constant battle against complacency. To ward this off, the political class periodically conjures up imminent threats to US superiority. In the 1990s the ...”

“... the deck to see if any stray pieces of ice had come on board. Elizabeth Eustis and Martha Eustis Stevenson, sisters from Haverford, Pennsylvania, travelling first-class, were asleep in their cabin. The collision, though almost soundless – ‘like tearing a strip of calico, nothing more’ – woke them up. Elizabeth Eustis, putting on ‘her wrapper, her ...”

“... a second time, when a woman in the congregation forbade them. The poor girl, whose name was Anne Stevenson, declared that about three years ago she had a child by him, and that he had many times promised her marriage ..., and that he had kept her company so lately as Michaelmas last, and farther that she would be glad to be married to him at any time. Anne ...”

“... Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now in his nineties and still occasionally practising, came to Balliol as a Rhodes Scholar from New Zealand in 1928. He boxed, rowed and through the Carlton Club became a protégé of Nancy Astor. Their ...”

“... Murdered Drinker’ are masterly, invoking as they do the narrative spirit of Scott and Stevenson as well as Hardy (and Hardy learnt much from Scott): To set the scene. The night Wind is rushing the moon Across the winter road. A mile away a farm Blinks its oily eye. There may be a certain self-indulgence, at the end of so brief a poem, in the ...”

“... unaccountable power of banks and other sinister financial interests. Half a century or so after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, around 60 per cent of Americans still dissent from the official verdict that a lone gunman was responsible, though there’s no consensus about the identity of the conspirators: variously the Mafia, the CIA or Castro’s ...”

“... of architecture is replete with figures whose careers were tied to the fortunes of great cities. John Nash’s genius for town-planning could only have flourished in London during the post-Waterloo boom years. Stanford White’s feeling for opulence fits the New York scene of the 1890s like an evening glove. So, too, did mid-Victorian Glasgow define the ...”

“... was concerned were irregular migration and the terrorist threat. The US increased military aid and John Kerry paid a visit to praise the dedication of the security forces. In 2014, a new internal electronic surveillance body was set up, modelled on the NSA, with support from the EU and other Western embassies. Well-equipped anti-terror police based in the ...”

“... is why Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are read all over the world while Pushkin, despite the efforts of John Fennell, Antony Wood. DM. Thomas and Vladimir Nabokov, remains primarily a writer for readers of Russian. The myriad imperfections of rendering in any translation of a novel do not seriously impede what looks like genuine literary enjoyment: we weep for Anna ...”

“... practitioners as L.P. Hartley and Walter de la Mare, to the definitive achievements of M.R. James, Stevenson and Le Fanu, and their Gothic predecessors. The ghost story, or original tale of the supernatural, was essentially a short story, delicately crafted to obtain the maximum effect from its metaphysical equivocations. If it did not aspire to the ...”

“... but I did go there two years later, taking the bus to a populous cemetery in the small town of Stevenson. Mrs Wallace’s spot was up against the right-hand wall, deep in the shadow of the Ardeer Explosives Factory. Of course, something has since happened to the factory and its cooling towers too, but I remember their real presence in that ...”