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“... But if the obsequies are awkward, ‘a good death’ in the 17th-century sense, like John Evelyn’s touching description at his mother’s bedside in 1635 – now that is really difficult. One name is common to Rosemary Dinnage’s thanatological anthology of personal views about hopes and fears, and the social-historical essays edited by Ralph ...”

“... given to jokes, even if his poems are often wry:As I sd to myfriend, because I amalways talking, John, Isd, which was not hisname, the darkness sur-rounds us, whatcan we do againstit or else, shall wewhy not, buy a goddamn big car,drive, he sd, forchrist’s sake, lookout where yr going.‘I Know a Man’ was included in Creeley’s first major ...”

“... to place on record their sense of admiration for the dignity and courage displayed by Mr and Mrs John Profumo and their family in the quarter-century since the episode occurred. ‘This letter,’ they continued, ‘also records our feelings that it is now appropriate to consign the episode to history.’ It was an odd letter and I would be surprised if Lord ...”

“... The trial of Dr John Bodkin Adams at the Old Bailey in 1957 was one of the causes célèbres of the post-war years. Apart from sex, it had everything. Adams was a fashionable Eastbourne doctor. Portly. With a chauffeur-driven Rolls. Charged with murdering one of his rich old women patients, for a chest of silver. There were strong hints she was not his only victim ...”

“... of all Byron’s doxies’. He quotes Byron’s own reminiscence of his cousin, Margaret Parker, ‘one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings’, only to round off the paragraph by observing that Margaret Parker ‘took evanescence to the limit by dying’. Biographer and subject could hardly be closer in step ...”

“... we find his basic line of argument taken up by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, to some degree by John Stuart Mill and even more closely (Berlin might have added) by Henry Sidgwick. This great tradition of classical utilitarianism proved impressively successful at occupying the entire conceptual space, thereby managing to dismiss any rival interpretations as ...”

“... numbers. If, in the process, it was discovered that the famous proof-text for the Trinity in I John was attested by almost no Greek manuscripts, though it existed in all Latin texts, manuscript and printed, what was to be done? It is, says modern scholarship, probably a late interpolation, designed to combat heretical denial of the doctrine. Leave it ...”

“... a voice at the start assures us that Robin Hood robbed the rich to feed the poor. But when Little John (a bear) asks Robin (a fox), ‘Are we good guys or bad guys?’ Robin hedges: ‘We never rob; we borrow a bit from those who can afford it.’ Later in the film, bad King John (a lion) tries to firm up the moral ...”

“... overshadowed by a sale of Impressionist art at Christie’s, and almost escaped the attention of John Maynard Keynes, a Newton enthusiast. As it was, Keynes missed most of the lots, and shortly after the auction set about clawing back papers from successful bidders. Most of what he recovered concerned alchemy. On his death in 1946, Keynes bequeathed what is ...”

“... but he always turned against the end-product and its author. Philip Purser, for instance (‘Nosy Parker’ in Edward’s usual post-publication demonology), tried hard, in his short but entertaining The Extraordinary Worlds of Edward James (1978), to achieve detachment, but there is inevitably a feel of his subject’s breath on the back of his neck, and of ...”

“... Cruickshank, Rowlandson and Dent; and portrayed by Romney, Beechey, Hoppner, Matthew Peters and John Russell. Nor has she been entirely forgotten by posterity. To be sure, she was not even mentioned by name in Percy Fitzgerald’s two-volume life of King William IV, published in 1884. But she merited an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, there ...”

“... you’re a bachelor, or James Goldsmith, or a lesbian, or Welsh, or a good-looking nun, or Peter Parker, or a social worker, or a cat? You could always (well, not the cat) try taking Waugh to court. But who would want to stand up in the Old Bailey and declare himself not ‘the silliest man in England’? And who would wish to be measured and perhaps ...”

“... Party in 1937, an unforeseen problem arose, and she found herself having to call a friend Mr Parker because she wasn’t sure whether to go on saying ‘Rafe’ or ‘if, like other middle-class comrades, he’d changed his pronunciation (to “Ralph”) to suit the Party’. This was the merry world of Cyril Connolly’s ‘Where Engels fears to ...”

“... alienation – and simultaneously reaches back to incorporate the styles and modes of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, Perelman and Groucho Marx.For my young self, the crucial juncture occurred when, thanks to Annie Hall, Allen became famous in England. Up until 1976 he was an oddity, a little-known Jewish funny man, a minority-interest comedian. With Annie ...”

“... Halston trouser suit.’) Next on the list are Bob Geldof and Paula Yates: According to Alan [Parker], Bob had a cock so big that he needed a wheelbarrow to carry it around in . . . But one didn’t need to have coffee with Alan Parker to know that Bob had a big dick. Everything about him announced the fact: the ...”