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“... 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 exactly in the introduction to his wonderful Collected ...”

“... cries. No lip-service to democratic legitimacy here. I was unaware until subsequently reading Paul Foot in the Guardian that Macdonald started somewhere to the left of Stalin and Trotsky together, so that to the cry of Blairite cronyism can be added a still louder cry of class treachery. But what of it? David Kirkwood, one of the original Red Clydesiders ...”

“... tenacious efforts by Watson, his fellow Labour MP Chris Bryant and the Guardian reporter Nick Davies to show that Mulcaire and Goodman were fall-guys. The Press Complaints Commission meanwhile proved it was dysfunctional by devoting an entire report in November 2009 to a sardonic dismissal of Davies’s painstaking ...”

“... more people are coming to work in the tightly packed central area,’ the then transport secretary Paul Channon wrote in the preface to the Central London Rail Study: ‘This is putting severe strains on London’s transport system.’ The study included a map of Central London’s train routes captioned ‘Extent of Overcrowding in 1987’, a spaghetti mess ...”

“... of handing Cossacks camping in Austria back to the Soviet forces and almost certain death. Major Davies wept as he carried out his orders, but heartless German concentration camp guards could equally well claim they had merely ‘carried out orders’. The detail given by Botting, by Whiting and, more soberly, by Holmes can help us get the bombing of ...”

“... Heaney in Wintering Out, the jokey juxtaposition of national matters and erotic ones is more like Paul Muldoon. ‘Pobl y Cwm’, for instance (‘people of the valley’), records changes in the Rhondda through terrible puns (‘We’ve no news of King Coal’) and an outrageous final conceit: They’re expanding The factory at Merthyr That makes Janet ...”

“... for four years with the ambassador, William Bullitt. In 1937, Bullitt was replaced by Joseph Davies, and Kennan was sent to head the Russian desk at the State Department’s division for Eastern European affairs in Washington, where he had ample opportunity to observe his own country and brood about its prospects. American society in the late 1930s, he ...”

“... Busson. My mistake.) Some of its trustees turn up in politics: the Conservatives’ Lord Fink and Paul Marshall, a Lib Dem and chairman of Marshall Wace, a large hedge fund. Marshall is also the chair of the DfE’s board of non-executive directors. Until recently, Sir Theodore Agnew of the Inspiration Trust, which runs 12 schools in Norfolk, was also a Ned ...”

“... an increasing homogeneity of casting (the ‘anything with Tara Fitzgerald’ syndrome). Andrew Davies withdrew his adaptation of Angela Lambert’s A Rather English Marriage from the BBC when Alan Yentob insisted that an aristocratic ex-Battle of Britain pilot be played by David Jason; ITV loved it, but made similar demands. Eventually, back at the ...”

“... his death, but maintains a degree of prudence even when showing off. ‘I went home with Nigel Davies to his flat in Curzon Street and had an amazing connection and etc etc etc.’Channon was drawn to men in his own elite circle, but the trend in these books is for well-to-do men to seek sex and romance outside their own class, among soldiers and working ...”

“... courteous, but demanding and uncommunicative Kubrick. Raphael is often very funny (a tanned Jean-Paul Belmondo, glimpsed in a Paris café, ‘looks like a crème brûlée with white hair’), and he has a good ear for speech patterns, so that we do consistently seem to hear Kubrick speaking (‘Freddie? Can you talk?’ ‘You’re stopping work for ...”

“... The Seven Per Cent Solution. Many American and British novelists, from Truman Capote to Piers Paul Read, have taken on the non-fiction thriller. But the benefits of fictional devices to serious non-fiction, from the days of André Maurois’s romanticised version of Shelley to Norman Mailer’s pastiche of Marilyn Monroe, have seemed more dubious. With ...”

“... wife, Virginia, later married Charles Lederer, the scriptwriter nephew of the mistress, Marion Davies. The couple spent a lot of time at Hearst’s castle, San Simeon. Herman Mankiewicz, who shared the script credit on Kane (rightly, according to both books), and who so feared that Welles would try to deprive him of this (wrongly, according to Ms ...”

“... for the illustrated newspapers in the 1880s and 1890s. Lance Calkin, Frank Craig, Samuel Begg, Paul Renouard and others filled the pages of the Illustrated London News, the Graphic and Black and White while continuing to exhibit at the Royal Academy and the Salon. Their newspaper work – its realism and variety of subjects, its experiments with cropping ...”