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“... In his heyday, from the late Forties to around the start of William Glock’s regime at the Third Programme (afterwards Radio Three), Hans Keller’s vehement presence was a force for the good in English musical life. He represented at a high level old-style modern values – not exactly cosmopolitan (an important reservation to which I shall return) but emphatically not insular ...”

“... at the time because the Mirror was doing rather well. It had no proprietor. A year earlier, Robert Maxwell, who, with Mrs Thatcher’s encouragement, had been allowed to buy the Mirror in spite of the findings of a government report 13 years previously that he was unfit to run a public company, had gone overboard once too often and drowned. Trade unions were ...”

“... what they wished, and many were’. Though they made exceptions (for Harold Ross, H.L. Mencken, Maxwell Perkins), most of them held editors in contempt, so that the turn to Hollywood (taken, among others, by Sayre’s father, whose credits include Annie Oakley, Gunga Din and, with William Faulkner and Nunnally ...”

“... mapped.There are also thousands of memorable moments, some distinguished by hindsight (Robert Maxwell declaring: ‘I will have left the world a slightly better place by having lived in it’), some by the way radio forefronts every tic, hesitation and obfuscation, and some by personal revelation. In 2020, as Covid added a piquancy to the programme’s ...”

“... of John Butler Yeats, which had been transcribed, then typed, then donated to the library by William M. Murphy, John Butler Yeats’s biographer. And now I looked up from the Yeats letters to find a man looking at me. It struck me immediately who he was. He was William M. Murphy himself, the author of Prodigal ...”

“... wharfinger who soon succumbs to cholera. Adopted by a parson and educated as a doctor, his son William turns up at Guy’s Hospital playing hand to the mind of James Hinton – a surgeon in whose philosophy the Ripper’s role as ‘time’s abortionist’ is first outlined. White Chappell is preoccupied by the Ripper murders, but Sinclair is not seeking ...”

“... David Bailey portrait, the Sixties icon that makes the Twins look like two portions of Robert Maxwell, split by an axe. The Krays allowed Pearson the status of a nightclub photographer with a flash in his fist. He was supposed to offer his contribution to their albums of vanity. Lambrianou, in his revisionist, post-prison version, explains what ...”

“... The great Yankee book editors made themselves great by ignoring this advice. The best of them – Maxwell Perkins, Robert Giroux, Joe Fox, Bennett Cerf – allowed many brilliant young things to roll about on their front lawns, and some days they even took a drink in the company of these writers, or let their dogs loose to lick their fidgety, callused ...”

“... Murdoch, most of it at some deep level boring because it is so much on one side or the other. William Shawcross surprised and disappointed many of his admirers by coming out as a big Murdoch fan in his 1992 biography. Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which ...”

“... the light of future events, entirely appropriate. In the novel, Aldous Raeburn – the future Lord Maxwell – is a true-blue Tory and a champion of the 1890s game laws. Handsome, well-bred and aristocratic, he falls in love with Marcella, a young Fabian. ‘I come fresh into your country life,’ she tells Aldous, ‘and the first thing that strikes me is ...”

“... the Falklands invasion but he allowed himself to be persuaded by Mrs Thatcher to stay in office. William Whitelaw has written that he wanted to resign as Home Secretary after an intruder had entered the Queen’s bedroom in Buckingham Palace, but that Mrs Thatcher would not let him. Jim Prior unsuccessfully tried to resign as Northern Ireland Secretary after ...”

“... pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all the “taboo” subjects that are perhaps better repressed’. ‘A career of this kind,’ Stanley Kauffmann wrote in 1964, that takes sexual and other sensory pleasures so ...”

“... building in Port Glasgow is a castle – Newark Castle, inherited in the 17th century by the Maxwell family, who turned it from an austere tower house into what the guidebook calls a Renaissance mansion. The Clyde rises and falls only a few yards from the castle’s back door, and in 1668 Sir George Maxwell sold ...”

“... 1943, over the West River (as James Schuyler thought it should be called) to New Jersey (and the Maxwell House factory): ‘Chemical air/sweeps in from New Jersey,/and smells of coffee.’ One would almost not know of its provenance or personal significance, the evidence is pushed back onto two or three words, ‘the chains of condemned ...”

“... altogether sinister ‘period’ sprite, the celebrity-chasing and deeply closeted impresaria Elsa Maxwell.) All three of Cohen’s subjects were intelligent, ambitious, creative, forceful women blessed with charisma, charm and near inexhaustible energy, not to mention the financial wherewithal to create around themselves what their biographer calls, tactfully ...”