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“... The other day, I found myself in a taxi queue with Anthony Blunt. He looked frayed but fervently cheerful, much as if he had just been dug out of the ruins of his own bombed house. Never mind the furniture, the books and the glass: the ceiling had come down, but the dear old family dining-table had taken the strain ...”

“... which gossip had spoken of as not unknown in the German army. [Emphasis mine.] On page 222 of Anthony Summers’s vastly enjoyable and revealing book, we find J. Edgar Hoover’s lovely home in Rock Creek Park being done up at taxpayers’ expense, complete with ‘hand-crafted fruit bowl’ and ‘a heated toilet seat, invented in the FBI ...”

“... find better uses for insanity. But first he wanted to be rich. Warhol’s attitude to money was a cross between Jay Gatsby’s and Holly Golightly’s – he yearned for the world where money allowed you to be whoever you wanted to be, where money was confidence and confidence was character, and where each day was a promise of diamonds as big as the ...”

“... Harold Macmillan’s judgment on Anthony Eden, that ‘he was trained to win the Derby in 1938; unfortunately, he was not let out of the starting stalls until 1955,’ was echoed by Anthony Nutting: ‘he had for too long been the Golden Boy of the Tory Party, the glamorous Crown Prince awaiting the summons to mount the throne in place of the ageing Emperor ...”

“... That way, when it turns out to be, at best, only half-good, I won’t have got cold, or wet, or cross with myself for being too demanding or not demanding enough. What a way to be a film-lover. Films were everything to me in my teens. I’d bunk off school to get to the first afternoon showing of the first day of 8½ or Pierrot le Fou, hunkering down in the ...”

“... of an hour’s hiatus in library services while the dying member was discreetly removed to Charing Cross Hospital and the blood and brains mopped up. Carlyle, who witnessed the confusion and was told what had happened, showed no symptoms of emotion, and went up to the Reading Room, instructing the librarian to fetch the book he had ordered (the second volume ...”

“... Lurie’s obituary of Mary McCarthy, Salman Rushdie on Graham Greene, Claire Tomalin on Coleridge, Anthony Burgess on Fielding, other reviews by Anita Brookner, Peter Conrad, Roy Foster and Hilary Mantel), and as the limits on the new paper’s resources became apparent I thought how hard it would be to put together pages of comparable stature. There was one ...”

“... Something to hold onto, whose title would itself have been greeted with fellow-feeling by Bagshaw. Anthony Powell’s character is fascinated by things for their own sake, an attitude not common among either believers or men of action. Kermode’s sense of history, of the novels and poems of the Thirties, is of the same kind. He has a strong feeling for ...”

“... of ‘the few lovers of good verse’. It seems that Pennington also collaborated on a Life of Anthony Eden, first published in 1938: however, the British Library strangely did not acquire a copy (nothing fishy here, I hope?). Coal-holes, obscurity: I can’t seem to find much clue to his psyche here, beyond a familiarity with the shadows. Let us forget ...”

“... as ‘structuralists’, has been around a long time. Even in 1966, a friendly commentator, Anthony Wilden (not mentioned here), was complaining that many of Lacan’s writings had been allowed to go out of print! The concept of stade de miroir which is of ‘crucial importance from Lacan’s viewpoint’ dates from 1936. The same commentator remarked ...”

“... and easily stop you getting on with whatever it is you are supposed to be doing if you are not Anthony Burgess. About as quickly as I managed to get a foot inside the door, I was sent a copy of Byzantium endures – Michael Moorcock. That one, icons iconing, balalaikas balalaikaing, kept me up nights marking pages, memorising passages, and dreaming dreams ...”

“... missile system with an 800-mile range was about to come into service in Argentina, I contacted Anthony Terry, under whose byline the story appeared, at his residence in France. From Terry, and by dint of cross-checking, I discovered that Italian and West German rocket experts have been developing the Condor missile at ...”

“... the biggest prig of all. When trying to adapt socialism to the affluent society of the late 1950s, Anthony Crosland had little time for this puritanical earnestness: ‘Total abstinence,’ he observed, ‘and a good filing system are not now the right signposts to the socialist Utopia.’ In at least two ways, however, Crosland’s put-down of the Webbs ...”

“... world. The rector and his angelic wife, their son Edgell and his sinister fiancée Vera Cross, make a tableau in disquiet and secrecy which is proof of the author’s admiration for The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables. Edgell’s name is clearly derived from the Communist writer Edgell Rickword – fashionable fellow-travelling was ...”

“... necessities of the body.’ The transition to bodily inhibition took place quite slowly, however: Anthony Wood complained that when Charles II’s courtiers left Oxford, they also left ‘their excrements in every corner, in chimneys, studies, coal-houses, cellars’. True civility was the property of the city. ‘Since classical times,’ Thomas ...”