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“... life peers. Among those elevated were senior party donors, Johnson’s editor at the Telegraph, Charles Moore, his confidant Evgeny Lebedev, and his brother. How much – or how little – has changed in the 26 years since a Conservative prime minister established a framework to promote ethics in British political life.In October​ 1994, John Major’s ...”

“... to meet – leaders of governments-in-exile, naval commanders, bomber pilots, H.G. Wells, the boy-king of Yugoslavia – was made available. Churchill played host at a country-house weekend. The queen had her to tea at Buckingham Palace. Anthony Eden took her to the movies. Drawbell wasn’t satisfied. In the book he wrote about Thompson’s visit – Dorothy ...”

“... with a lot of anxious and eager kids all wanting to hear they’re the greatest thing since, say, Charles Olson.’ This might be Larkin to Kingsley Amis, and it’s a nice sting in the tail that we can be sure Heaney and Longley thought Olson no great thing. Even less expected is a postcard to David Hammond, a singer and TV director and one of Heaney’s ...”

“... and forging links with various Resistance groups: communists, Zionists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle. Over the course of the war, the 6th helped to save as many as ten thousand Jews from deportation. Shatz GalleryOnly four people worked in the lab. The director was a man known as Loutre (‘Otter’). Kaminsky’s assistants, the Schidlof ...”

“... is unknowable, but Brindle offers a counterfactual hint in his account of the chapel of King’s College, Cambridge. The Perpendicular fan vaulting of the master mason John Wastell sits in harmony with later Flemish stained glass and French wood carving, embellished with classical motifs. It is Gothic going on Renaissance. Instead, cut off from ...”

“... He certainly started out in different circles. After university he became a research assistant to Charles Kennedy, then an SDP MP. Marshall himself stood in Fulham on an SDP-Liberal ticket in 1987, but finished a distant third. He kept up an interest in politics, founding a City branch of Liberal Democrat supporters in the mid-1990s and paying for party ...”

“... the point of view of a biographer,’ Ellmann later recalled, ‘I had tumbled into King Tut’s tomb.’ The subsequent story shows him embroiled in a classic tale of acquisitiveness within the modern academy. Mrs Joyce was keen to realise the value of her cellar and Ellmann advised her to put the papers in the hands of Ottocaro Weiss, an old ...”

“... essentially the process whereby first the Monarchy lost the substance of its prerogatives to the King-in-Parliament, and then the Lords lost most of theirs to the Commons, leaving the latter in something perilously close to full control of the State. In short, what is normally accounted the emergence of democracy. It is this process which has remained ...”

“... campaign, Jesse Jackson proclaimed himself ‘the general in this war to fight drugs’; Charles Rangel, Harlem’s longest-serving congressional representative and one of the most powerful figures in New York’s black political machine, was second to none in his opposition to drug decriminalisation. There were 130 police departments led by black ...”

“... Othello. There is nothing flashy about it. There’s no twist in the tail as there is in Charles Willeford’s Pick-Up, where the meaning of the book swivels on the final revelation that the narrator is black, so that all the assumptions of the readers of pulp picaresque are challenged. Pick-Up, as Sallis remarks in an interview with Gerald ...”

“... Darker jokes, which do have to do with the appetite for violence, flicker around memories of Charles Manson. Mickey worries that his TV ratings are lower than those for a Manson programme, but consoles himself: ‘Yeah, it’s pretty hard to beat the king.’ A group of interviewees for the TV show, identified in the ...”

“... of ships sunk’. Reporters​ soon understood they had to be cheerful. Dimbleby’s BBC colleague Charles Gardner was attached to the RAF in France when British forces were falling back to the Channel in the late spring of 1940. His diary records that an officer told the press corps they should ‘go around with bright smiling faces’. Gardner added ...”

“... Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to ...”

“... Nixon Administration, but the President and Kissinger didn’t know that. Nixon therefore ordered Charles Colson, an official on his staff, to come up with a plan to ‘neutralise’ Ellsberg. Colson in turn enlisted the services of a former CIA officer called Howard Hunt, who had been the mastermind behind the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba. Hunt had ...”

“... in Gatsby, Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker, were based on Fitzgerald’s early girlfriend, Ginevra King, and her classmate at the Westover School in Connecticut, Edith Cummings, a noted golfer. The men in the story are not so easy to pin down, beginning with Nick Carraway, the narrator. Carraway grew up in the Midwest and might have brushed shoulders with ...”