“... Any More’: a combination of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and the more candid letters of Wilfred Owen. Palimpsest fills in the blanks. For half a century, Gore Vidal has been living selfishly and hedonistically, because all this time he has been living for two.It is via the Jimmy Trimble romance that the madeleine of these memoirs is unwrapped, and it is ...”

“... she had rejected the gift as ‘inappropriate’. The case continues. Last month Musharraf told Owen Bennett-Jones of the BBC World Service that his government would not interfere with the proceedings: ‘That’s up to the Swiss government. Depends on them. It’s a case in their courts.’ In Britain the legal ...”

“... champion’ at the Home Office. During the pandemic, he hit the headlines for trying to absolve Owen Paterson, a fellow Tory MP, who had improperly lobbied on behalf of a private firm specialising in Covid testing.By May 2021, the UK government had paid more than £600 million to management consultants for Covid-related projects, with Deloitte’s £279 ...”

“... tried to dress up outing Thiel as his own statement of principle. Gawker’s Silicon Valley editor Owen Thomas (who is himself gay) had written:How many out VCs do you know? I think it explains a lot about Thiel: his disdain for convention, his quest to overturn established rules. Like the immigrant Jews who created Hollywood a century ago, a gay investor has ...”

“... Stones. There is a certain amount of minor-key keening around the ‘mysterious’ death of Brian Jones, but that story circulates very much as a cautionary tale rather than an airy fable, all too humanly squalid, with nothing mythic or fantastical about it. (Even a lowlife encyclopedist like myself emerges from any time spent reading about ...”

“... war, Gurney’s is the war of the private infantryman, as against the subalterns’ war of Owen or Grenfell, Sassoon or Blunden or Graves. Because he is not of the officer class, he feels no responsibility for the horror, hence no guilt about it, and so his revulsion from it is manageable. He is nearer to David ...”

“... to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in 1940, became the minister responsible for the colonies; and the ‘garden city ideal’ of the Town and Country Planning Association shaped the ‘architecturally modest and socially ...”

“... her remotely right. They included Chris Patten, John Patten, William Waldegrave and Tristan Garel-Jones, and were soon to be joined by John Major. In the pamphlet they used as an epigraph a line from Macmillan: ‘We have at least the most important thing of all at the head of our government, a prime minister of courage, who I hope will not be led away from ...”

“... Chapman, despite himself, falling in love with his platoon and their life together much as Wilfred Owen did. He went on to become a professor of history at Leeds, where he married the novelist Storm Jameson, and thinking about it, I realise he must have taught the man who taught me history at school, H.H. Hill. So exhilarated have I been by the book, I find ...”

“... of the candidates who wasn’t born and raised in the town. Even the Conservative candidate, Marc Jones, was born to a staunch Labour family in East Marsh. Ayling is from South London, and only moved to rural Lincolnshire, south of Grimsby, in the 2000s (she did have a spell in Hull early in her career, marketing cod liver oil).She has also had to fend off ...”