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“... black sweaters and tight jeans, watching the furious activity and dialogue, and then went home to read Being and Nothingness (or perhaps just its popularisation in Colin Wilson’s The Outsider). And maybe, later on, it was Marlowe and Spade who gave us the courage and foolheadedness to take to the streets. We were young and had energy to expend, so ...”

“... It was evident that she was embarrassed, and all the more so when I showed her ‘the little Lord Jesus’ that I had lifted off the arms of the Virgin Mary on a small musical box, presumably (in this atheist household) borrowed from nursery school. The police officers laid out what they had found: the official history of the Soviet Communist ...”

“... was prompted by local piety, for Brown was brought up and has his constituency in Smith’s home town of Kirkcaldy, but it was also a product of his distaste at the reductive reading of Smith by those on the right, and his need to find historical inspiration for a non-conservative, communitarian engagement with the inevitabilities of global ...”

“... to minister of state sooner rather than later. Mullin accepts again. He quits as chair of the Home Affairs Select Committee and joins what is baggily known as the Department of Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR): in effect, the Ministry for John Prescott, whose amour-propre demands a duly sprawling apanage. Mullin goes to Fenwick’s at his ...”

“... a college freshman), but in the 1950s, famous after the publication of the technically masterful Lord Weary’s Castle in 1946, he started to feel stultified by the modernism of his heroes: ‘I began to have a certain disrespect for the tight forms,’ he said in a 1961 interview. Poetry had ‘become a craft, purely a craft, and there must be some ...”

“... from Austria. The other woman was a Londoner, Muriel Eady, who had grown up in a children’s home after her mother died in the flu epidemic of 1918. A femur belonging to one of the women, dug up by the Christies’ dog, Judy, was being used to prop up a fence.The story of the six bodies was of instant sensational interest to the prim but prurient 1950s ...”

“... change of temper may be that, whereas in 1969 he could half-hint at a coming upsurge in favour of Home Rule, he now writes in the aftermath of the abortive referendum of 1979. He extols the belief, partly inherited from the Enlightenment, which he finds in Scottish radicalism down to the 1920s: that ‘by the exercise of political will, the people hold their ...”

“... E.P. Thompson, historian and peacemaker, known as Edward to his friends, died at his home near Worcester in 1993. Four years on, Beyond the Frontier is a volume of material set aside far earlier. Indeed, there occurs in it a passing reference to ‘the raw material for half-finished books on William Blake and Customs in Common’, works long since published ...”

“... Russell’s autobiography stresses that while outwardly well-behaved, he ‘found living at home only endurable at the cost of complete silence about everything that interested me’. Barbara Wootton and her childhood friends went further, and fended off the adults by evolving a private language. Only the exceptional child writes down his ...”

“... becoming a land-owning capitalist class ready to collaborate with the colonial power and join the Home Guard, thus sharpening African resistance to British rule on the whetstone of class struggle; whereas Ndebele protests were articulated by compromised chiefs and soft men of substance incapable of leading an armed insurrection. Nevertheless, Ranger finds the ...”

“... carpets and ruined people for whom the morning was a long way down. I guess I could have gone home, but something in me wanted to stay, and so I did. When it’s over, when your youth is gone, you wonder what those times were all about, but there’s no point asking. They were about Soho and a whole lot of nonsense you’ll never hear again.There were ...”

“... next day in Birmingham. The five were taken to Morecambe police station where Dr Frank Skuse, a Home Office forensic scientist, tested their hands for evidence of contact with explosives. Meanwhile a posse of detectives from the West Midlands Serious Crimes Squad headed up the motorway to interview the suspects. In Morecambe Skuse conducted a Griess ...”

“... The first few messages say There are clues everywhere. Then a message is delivered to Rebus’s home: For those who read between the times. It becomes clear that the killer has some personal connection to the detective. An Eng. Lit. professor at Edinburgh University calls Rebus to say that, as the author of Reader Exercises and Directed Exegetic ...”

“... of British society. It is hard to believe that he ever knew what was really going on inside the Home Office, or the armed forces, or the City of London, or the countryside, or the weapons industry, or NHS hospitals, or inner-city classrooms, or prisons, or PFI projects, or the boardrooms of multinational corporations. It might be said that he didn’t need ...”

“... and a year later he died, aged 36. Soon afterwards, my mother went to the restaurant to bring home the Bonhomme Richard. The new owner said she could have it if she paid him what she thought it was worth. It was a trap. Newly widowed, she did not have what she knew it was worth, yet to offer less would diminish my father’s work. She tossed her head and ...”