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“... one’s sense of the possibilities. Fifteen years ago we enjoyed the primes of Jon Vickers, Janet Baker, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Joan Sutherland – all of whom came triumphantly into that category; the voices of Cathy Berberian and Peter Pears vitally inspired Berio and Britten to write important new works for them. Today the excellence of Placido ...”

“... activist whose convictions had a deep influence on Frank, her oldest son. He had three siblings, Michael, Bridget and Margaret; Michael went on to become a notably progressive archbishop of Canterbury. Frank’s brilliance was evident from the start. He taught himself to read almost as soon as he could talk and won a ...”

“... racism and the blinkered interests of the intelligence bureaucracy. But a key factor, as Nancy Baker shows in General Ashcroft, her comprehensive assessment of John Ashcroft’s tenure as Bush’s first attorney general, is that conservatives view national security through the lens of their ongoing Kulturkampf against the 1960s. As attorney general in ...”

“... for state planning in The Social Function of Science. In response the Oxford geneticist John Baker set up a Society for Freedom in Science, with a passionate attack on any attempt to tell scientists what they should work on or the methods they should use. The conflict between Bernalian and Bakerian views of science runs throughout Freedom’s ...”

“... two metres square, without touching each other, and read their papers without falling over. At Baker Street, the Metropolitan departs from its original Paddington route. We hit the surface and after Finchley Road I was able to sit by the window. The heating warmed my ankles. Everyone in the carriage was getting drowsy. It was strangely luxurious. You tend ...”

“... to is Zen – not Aurelio Zen (the detective who featured in eleven crime novels by the late Michael Dibdin) but the meditative self-awareness associated with Zen Buddhism (the dedicatees of Okotie’s three novels – Maitreyabandhu, Danayutta and Sanghasiha – are all associated with the London Buddhist Centre). The Okotie detective is not, though, a ...”

“... to rise from the ashes. Several prominent Tory Brexiteers, including Iain Duncan-Smith and Steve Baker, have military backgrounds. As with the Second World War, Brexit will perform an X-ray of our collective moral fibre. Remainers love facts, but are afraid of the truth. This is, I suspect, as close to a Conservative ideology of Brexit as exists. At the very ...”

“... advocate. My own hunch is that other Gurney personae usually written off as lunatic fictions – Michael Flood, Frederick Saxby, Valentine Fane, Griffiths Davies and so on: there were many – may yet turn out to be comrades from the trenches, those other persons he so loved. Although writing of place-names rather than people, P.J. Kavanagh puts the matter ...”

“... The most riveting moment in Bermant’s book records an exchange between Argov and Sir Michael Palliser, who was permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office when Thatcher became prime minister. Argov told Palliser that Israelis saw Carrington (and maybe Palliser himself) as characteristic of the old English elite, whose disdain for the Jewish ...”

“... report’s author, Peter Clarke. Last summer, when he was still secretary of state for education, Michael Gove floated the idea of requiring schools to teach British values. In November, the DfE issued what it called ‘strengthened guidance’ on ‘promoting British values in schools’ – a necessary move, according to Lord Nash, the schools ...”

“... at the barber’s) about The Way to the Stars with the young Jean Simmons, and the making of Michael Powell’s A Canterbury Tale, and the first Royal Command Performance, another Powell film, A Matter of Life and Death.Suburban cinemas were often pretty comfortless places. While the entrance could be quite imposing, with the box-office generally at the ...”

“... had operated as part of what was known as the UDA’s No I Assassination Team. The soldier, Albert Baker, was later sentenced to life imprisonment on specimen charges involving four murders and 11 robberies. There was no doubt that he had been working for the Intelligence services during the time when he was a member of the UDA assassination squad. And there ...”

“... phrase ‘there you go again’ helped a lot, as did a note that one of Reagan’s advisers, Jim Baker, handed him just before he walked to his podium, on which he’d written the single word ‘chuckle’. Fired up by their success in 1980, the same team prepped Reagan for the first of two debates against Walter Mondale four years later. Here, it all went ...”

“... delight.Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester’s Stephens;Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evensOf trench foodKate Kennedy thinks he was equally talented in words and music: ‘The only other models,’ she writes in this new biography, ‘are Renaissance figures such as John Dowland and Thomas Campion.’ (She might have looked ...”

“... a face ‘sun-baked to the hue of coffee’ – and stalwart Dr (of course) Petrie, who, like his Baker Street predecessor, tells the story and gets the girl. Nayland Smith and Petrie exist in a state of wildly malfunctioning cliché: ‘His eyes were literally on fire,’ Petrie solemnly reports of one of Smith’s more agitated moments. Rohmer didn’t ...”