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“... of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin. As for London and Scottish Marine Oil’s Chris ...”

“... on one thing. Democracy was the enemy of civilisation. Thus, as elegantly described here by Robert Stewart, he could denounce Disraeli from the right over Reform questions, and recast Disraelian cynicism as collaborationist weakness. Any concession to the modish idea of democracy was disastrous in Salisbury’s eyes and many of these essays help us see the ...”

“... his chest, he lit a cigarette to deceive his men as to the seriousness of the wound. Patrick Shaw Stewart, who reminisced longingly of hot baths and starched shirts, wrote: ‘Every time I remember that nearly all my friends are dead I take some form of imaginary morphia, and promise myself work or love or letters, or fall back on the comfortable reflection ...”

“... just a marionette of conscience, a hodge-podge of the stiffest gestures of Gary Cooper and James Stewart. Tommy Lee Jones, the suave gay New Orleans businessman caught up in all kinds of nasty deals, is so deeply untrustworthy that you can’t take your eyes off him; everything he does is full of sleaze and interest. Donald Sutherland, by contrast, as the ...”

“... prophetic books has recently been called into question in a way which has largely confounded Michael Foot’s purpose in writing The History of Mr Wells. It is clear that Foot first conceived his biography as a celebration of Wells’s socialism – more particularly his ‘libertarian’ socialism, which Foot takes to be healthier than the ...”

“... his father had him locked up for a few minutes in a police cell, an episode that became, as Michael Wood puts it, the ‘myth of origin’ for his powerful distrust of authority. Ackroyd rummages dutifully for further evidence. Was young Alfred beaten at school by a ‘black-robed Jesuit’? Or caught out in the open when the Zeppelins raided London in ...”

“... like her.’ She would watch her old movies on TV. Once after seeing Bhowani Junction, she rang Stewart Granger to ask him: ‘Were we really that beautiful, honey?’ Even though the abiding impression is of a rather sad life emptied out by fun, one gets the sense from this book that Gardner was an extremely likeable person. She was coarse, though ...”

“... of politics, where decision making is the main topic of study, continue to think in state units, Michael Lynch’s big single-volume history of Scotland must take the foreground for anyone who wishes to know about the country and its past. It is a distinguished achievement, covering from the earliest records to the present day the story of a country still ...”

“... and galleries; or the Empire gets reimagined as an indulgence merely of the English. Yet, as Michael Fry argues in this vast, contentious volume, alongside the Reformation, the Treaty of Union and the Enlightenment, Empire was ‘one of the great formative experiences’ in Scotland’s past. The Scottish Empire is a remarkable book that could probably ...”

“... This last week I finish reading Common Ground by Rob Cowen and The Places In Between by Rory Stewart, both books about wildernesses, Stewart’s in Afghanistan, Cowen’s in almost comical contrast in and around Harrogate. As he tells the story Stewart seems in regular peril of his ...”

“... fantasy of racial degeneration. Luckily the hearties don’t have it all their own way. Michael Crick’s and David Smith’s book describes how, at the same time as Stan Cullis was assembling his Wolves team, Matt Busby at Manchester United was embarking on a managerial career uniquely committed to attractive attacking football. The triumph’n ...”

“... had been got up to look like a charity case, or a Wanted poster. Dead or alive. ‘Vote Michael Moorcock’, it said. ‘King of the City’. King of the City, a hefty London novel, character-packed, busy with competing narratives (confessing, denouncing, celebrating, plea-bargaining for its own sanity), was being punted by its publicists as ‘the ...”

“... off a convincing snarl. Yet he is remembered for certain qualities which appreciate over time. Michael Wreszin’s biography succeeds in spite of its invocation of the conservative revolutionary. While a genuine radical like James Cameron could famously say of himself that he was ‘conservative about everything except politics’, and while it’s true ...”

“... comedies made at Ealing Studios in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Indeed, as Stubbs reminds us, Michael Balcon, the studio’s head in its heyday, was explicit in defining its mission. When Ealing was sold in 1955, he placed a plaque on the studio building that read: ‘Here during a quarter of a century many films were made projecting Britain and the ...”

“... historian who writes about Northern Ireland is either a Loyalist, like J.C. Beckett and A.T.Q. Stewart, or a Republican like Michael Farrell, though I suspect that Buckland attempts to occupy the middle ground which is represented politically by the Alliance Party. Future historians will be grateful to him for his ...”