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“... Lawrence Stone guided my first steps into the maze of Anglo-American historiography; Christopher Hill accompanied, a long time ago now, the infant squawks of my early Marxism, which today is much eroded. Though if I still preserve some traces of my belief in that doctrine, I owe it to the high abilities of such ci-devant Marxist historians as ...”

“... answer would have been very reassuring. ‘Join Atomic Energy and live a longer life,’ Sir John Hill, chairman of the Atomic Energy Authority, said in 1976. Until 1984, even the Government went on claiming there had been no deaths from radiation inside a nuclear power plant. At Windscale, the nuclear plant in Cumbria which caused some local worries after a ...”

“... was revealed that Peter Mandelson had borrowed around £400,000 from him to buy a house in Notting Hill. Robinson stayed out in the cold while Mandelson, the man who borrowed the money, was reinstated a year later. Robinson’s special adviser, Chris Wales, was not required to resign. Wales had been taken on the Treasury staff in the summer of 1997, not long ...”

“... and themes which will make enough noise to fill up the silence of the great open spaces. Paul Auster’s Moon Palace is a ‘Western’ novel executed with consummate skill and an unerring feeling for the volume control. His epigraph, from Jules Verne – ‘Nothing can astound an American’ – prepares us for the layers of romantic irony ...”

“... So characteristic of Paul Muldoon’s poetry as to be almost a hallmark is the moment, unnerving and exciting in about equal measures, when his speaker is suddenly revealed to himself as someone else. The whole world expands and changes in ‘Cass and Me’ when, as a boy, he climbs on the older Cass’s shoulders, and they lean out                across the yard As a giant would across the world ...”

“... market. When oil was discovered near some vacant lots she had bought on the west slope of Signal Hill, her gamble seemed to have paid off. She clubbed together with the other local owners to discuss a joint sale. Sinclair accompanied her to ‘many disputatious meetings’ and took notes. The greed displayed by some of the owners – who argued that their ...”

“... Paul Theroux is the author of The Great Railway Bazaar and The Old Patagonian Express. He is better-known for these than for his nine novels. The novels are extraordinarily different from each other, and haven’t given a distinct image of Theroux as a novelist. He has set them in Kenya, Malawi, Singapore, London, Dorset, Cape Cod, and now in Honduras; and produced as many different kinds of novel ...”

“... Quant’s Bazaar, which opened in the King’s Road in 1955. The turning point was 1963, the year Paul McCartney went to Nancy Spain’s New Year’s Eve party and from which Larkin dated the beginning of the 1960s. Cooke agrees that it was the effective end of the 1950s. From that point it was not only sexual intercourse that began, it was also the moment ...”

“... She became a patron of living artists including Matthew Smith and the Neo-Romantics, writing of Paul Nash’s Landscape of the Vernal Equinox, that it was ‘slightly “magic” … it changes towards evening in a most mysterious manner.’ Meanwhile the stilted relations within the royal family reflected a national postwar generation gap. Four of Queen ...”

“... MSPs are ‘body swerving’ all attempts to break the deadlock. An exception is the Labour MSP Paul Sweeney, who has campaigned energetically for a resolution. He thinks that the GSA itself might now be willing to hand over the rebuild, but fears ‘nobody has the gumption to take it on.’ As well as mentioning Notre-Dame he makes a more telling if ...”

“... for a way of life which no one has properly valued until it was over. In the very first scene Paul Simon comes home from the war to his village, Schabbach in the Hunsrück. Neither his father’s forge nor his mother’s kitchen has changed for a hundred years; soon his mother will boil Easter eggs for his sons in the same way her own grandmother had ...”

“... bonds of good fellowship in the Westminster-Fleet Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by ...”

“... records. A brief affair with the daughter of the champion of the English Revolution, Christopher Hill, Master of Balliol. The interestingly named Fanny Hill was also involved, at this period, with Raymond Carr, Warden of St Antony’s College, which Marks describes as the ‘CIA’s Oxford annexe’. The property that the ...”

“... We are used to hard words from Belfast and the impingement (even in so wry and oblique a talent as Paul Muldoon) of uncomfortable sectarian truths. But McGuckian is like Denton Welch, whose war-diaries make no mention of the war: we can only just make out this century, let alone her own particular time and place. In a recent Muldoon poem which turns his fellow ...”

“... Why Brownlee left is Paul Muldoon’s third book of poems, and his most interesting so far. Whereas, in the earlier books, he didn’t do a great deal more than exercise the quirky, oblique lyricism which has become his personal signature, he puts it here to the service of an idea, or complex of ideas, which constitutes a private poetry of departure ...”