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“... alternative to Kundera: natural, comic, unself-conscious and Czech.) Betjeman, Wodehouse, Austen, Anthony Powell and Larkin are all examples, for Bayley, of this kind of evasive magic, which is opposed again and again to what he calls ‘seriousness’. Any jobbing writer, it seems, can be ‘serious’ or at least can talk about ‘seriousness’. But ...”

“... British novelists who went off to the war in mid-career in their mid-thirties, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, both wrote books about what they had seen at first hand, Waugh’s war being more overtly interesting (the Commandos, Crete, parachute training, Yugoslavia) but Powell’s more typical (garrison ...”

“... our joining the Common Market. It is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ...”

“... third line, incidentally, is less a grammatical error than a mark of class. Osbert Lancaster and Anthony Powell have both always let their participles dangle with abandon, and Evelyn Waugh, in the same chapter of his autobiography which tells us that only those who have studied Latin can write English, perpetrates at least one sentence whose past ...”

“... that he had had at Ladbroke Grove was written about as if it was the only dinner he gave – Anthony Powell got fussy about the Rioja. There were many others. Gabriel García Márquez came to one, and when Hugh went to get more wine from the cupboard downstairs, an after-dinner guest arrived. It was V.S. Naipaul. My father found him looking through ...”

“... skimming low over the tops and it feels like a scene from the 1940s. It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch. This isn’t wholly imagination either, as it turns out that there was a camp here during the war for American airborne troops, which makes the survival of these wonderfully elaborate pillars, still here ...”

“... a knife (it’s thirty years if a gun is involved). Ferguson got 22 years. Many, including Sir Anthony Hooper, a Lord Justice of Appeal until 2012, have serious misgivings about the use of joint enterprise. ‘The doctrine is too wide and should be limited so that only a person who intends to kill or cause grievous bodily harm is guilty of ...”

“... completely, by giving them deliberate pieces of misinformation. I don’t doubt that Orwell told Anthony Powell and Malcolm Muggeridge that he’d had a woman in the Park: but it is thin evidence that he did. I’m sure I’ve suppressed some revealing incidents that did take place. But, alas, I also discovered that several incidents to which people ...”

“... that I don’t think she can have suffered or had any apprehensions,’ Orwell wrote to his friend Anthony Powell. The claim that Eileen didn’t suffer, since he was not there at the time, he cannot have been able to verify. Her letters to him, which are full of apprehensions (‘I might die on the table on Thursday’), show that the second claim is ...”

“... between patriots. Nobody reasserted Englishness more emphatically than Colonel Robert Baden-Powell, hero of Mafeking. No organisation transmitted Englishness to a wider audience than the Boy Scout movement he founded in 1908. The extraordinary fame of the soldier made the extraordinary success of the movement possible. Both testify to the superb ...”

“... build an H-bomb, the angry ministers walked out. Above all, Churchill clung to office. He despised Anthony Eden, his heir apparent, who, he said, had ‘gone native’ among the ‘shuffling scuttlers’ at the Foreign Office. The last of the Yalta Big Three, he was determined to end the Cold War by personal diplomacy. The Cabinet was horrified to discover ...”

“... Nye Bevan called Hugh Gaitskell ‘a desiccated calculating-machine’. 5. Rab Butler said: ‘Sir Anthony Eden is the best prime minister we have.’ 6. Harold Macmillan campaigned in the 1959 Election on the slogan: ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ 7. Edward Heath gave his word to ‘cut rising prices at a stroke’. 8. Shirley Williams joined Arthur ...”

“... of Douglas-Home, and in 1957 instead of Macmillan; he has even said that he felt he, rather than Anthony Eden, should have followed Churchill as prime minister. Butler had little regard for Eden, of whom he said, ‘he is the best prime minister we have got,’ adding when asked to amplify the remark: ‘Oh, capax imperii and all that.’ In other ...”

“... curbing the social services, and controlling the trade unions, fell to Wilson and Callaghan. Anthony Crosland, the leading theorist of social democracy, served notice of a new order: ‘The party’s over.’ The headlines since then have been a record of almost unrelieved bad news for Labour. The destruction by Harold Wilson of Tony Benn’s industrial ...”

“... confidence and speed of decision which must have been intrinsic to the operations of General Colin Powell and his Allied colleagues. In a nutshell, the Security Council can proceed only by adopting resolutions, painstakingly worked out and involving compromise. War cannot he fought like that. It seems to me that what will come to be known as the Kuwait ...”