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“... in which his wife and her current lover are escaping from his farm for an illicit weekend. Here is Jack Soames drilling holes ‘in the roof above the guest bedrooms and peering down at them’. (Which just goes to show how far gossip can be embellished, especially in the heat: given the way houses were built in colonial Africa, surely even the most mutually ...”

“... pulled in $45,000. Readers out of sympathy with Diane Sawyer, and who relish the depiction of Tina Brown’s New Yorker as a salon for the rich and famous, may still feel that Washington Babylon gives equal opportunity for women a bad name. Dismissing the difference made by the President’s Supreme Court appointments, Cockburn and Silverstein worry not at all ...”

“... that might possibly be designated as someone else’s duty: the postwar world of I’m All Right Jack was already clear in embryo. The collision between these very different subcultures was brutal. The Canadians quickly discovered that 187 of their colleagues, taken prisoner, had been executed by the Hitler Jugend division – 30 mutilated Canadian bodies ...”

“... Hoping single clean pair of jeans don’t fall down on the way there. Was a regular Capability Brown yesterday directing the hauling guys in the backyard – yes, take away that Grecian urn from Home Depot (legacy of previous owners) – but the risk of accidental self-exposure had been great. For reasons I’ll explain in a moment, the new house is named ...”

“... you to buy a decent pair of trousers? Mods posed a far less obvious threat. They flew the Union Jack, after all, and most of them had jobs; they were clean, well turned-out and had nice haircuts. In 1964 there was a brief spasm of tabloid outrage over some rather tame skirmishes between Mods and Rockers, mostly conducted in bracing seaside ozone. Talk of ...”

“... dirt for dirt:     For there some stocks lay on the ground, One side was yellow, t’other brown; And velvet breeches (on her word), The inside all bedaubed with t—d. And just before, I’ll not desist To let you know they were be-pissed: Four different stinks lay there together, Which were sweat, turd, and piss, and leather. Mary Jones of ...”

“... experience fighting against the kinds of common experience labelled ‘heritage’. There are brown signs directing you off the road to crucial destinations, but in Cumberland, for instance, the land itself is the naked truth, the thing that the heritage industry can’t quite bottle and label. There’s just this immensity, with the clouds scudding over ...”

“... classroom? Have you ever noticed how most museum-goers don’t stop in front of Picasso’s dense, brown-hued Cubist masterpieces of 1911-12? Is Ellington’s accessibility compromised by puzzlement at the band’s idiosyncratic jungle sounds?The Jungle Band’s most extraordinary sounds were produced by the trumpeters Bubber Miley and Cootie Williams (who ...”

“... escapades of the Sixties as well as a few House and Garden glimpses of How He Lives Now. And the Jack Abbott fiasco is covered in some detail. The same cannot be said of Conversations with Capote. Here the indiscretions verge on mania, and it seems unlikely (though you never know) that even Capote would have allowed them to see print if he had lived. One ...”

“... The Eagle has landed, Patterson’s best best-seller (which he wrote under the name of Jack Higgins), is estimated to have sold 18 million copies in 42 languages; Forsyth’s last novel, The Dogs of War, runs alongside with an estimated 20 million copies in 24 languages. These authors are the literary equivalent of the multinational ...”

“... never rains. These films were ubiquitous in my youth; I can still recall every glint and gleam of Jack Nicholson’s dodgy grin as he frolicked across the beach with – and I wish I had a better descriptor – some young one.So what happens to an actress over the age of 45? Robbed of the big roles, she drinks, or goes mad, or does both at a great and ...”

“... outer firth.The bigger and more glamorous yards lay upriver at Dumbarton and Clydebank, where John Brown’s built the Queens for Cunard, and inside Glasgow’s city boundaries, where five or six companies on both banks (among them Harland & Wolff, Fairfield and Barclay Curle) gave Auden his ‘glade of cranes’. Downriver, the engine works and slipways of ...”

“... and for once had not cooked any of it. Then she bought a plastic policeman’s hat and a Union Jack flag on a stick and had a picture taken in front of Big Ben for 50p. When she arrived home at 7 p.m. the police were waiting, called by her panicked eldest daughter. They suspected Emecheta had been at a boyfriend’s house and questioned the absconding ...”

“... out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the ...”

“... believe them either. 16 January. Listening to Michael Heseltine justifying the £ 475,000 of Mr Brown, the chairman of British Gas, I remember Joe Fitton. During the war Dad was a warden in the ARP, his companion on patrol a neighbour, Joe Fitton. Somebody aroused Joe’s ire (a persistent failure to draw their blackout curtains perhaps) and one ...”