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“... are themselves adding’. Most of us would never have heard of Penelope Gilliatt and of the late Kenneth Tynan if they had not been weekly columnists. Both made a name as the Observer’s regular reviewers of (respectively) films and the theatre. It is true that Gilliatt was also a novelist, and that Tynan became the literary manager of the National ...”

“... The Conservative share in the polls in 1987 on the day Tim Bell rode into Downing Street on a white charger was 44 per cent. One week later, after the expenditure of all the serious money on advertising, their share of votes came out at ... 43 per cent. It wasn’t the media in 1987 which gave Mrs Thatcher her third historic victory. It was her megaphone ...”

“... in midtown Manhattan. In 1939 it received its own building, an International Style box clad in white marble designed by Philip Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, on 53rd Street. A significant extension has followed every twenty years or so, each coolly modernist in style – totally abstract, highly engineered, fiercely refined, elegantly branded. The first ...”

“... out has suggested a temperamental aversion to busy or obvious art. The visual silence of the white wall behind Woman with a Pearl Necklace, where originally there was a map, is an arresting compositional decision: the golden woman’s gaze, and the mirror’s reflection, meet invisibly in the great patch of pale light spreading from the window towards ...”

“... was of a different kind. His friends included the black novelist Richard Wright and critics like Kenneth Burke and Stanley Edgar Hyman; his heroes were Joyce and Eliot; he studied The Golden Bough for the mythical themes he hoped would make his novel immortal. Ellison aspired mightily and he dressed the part as he imagined it: Man of Letters, with carefully ...”

“... High to be the art director of a magazine they were starting; though it ran for only five issues, White Dove Review succeeded in attracting contributions from a number of the leaders of the country’s emerging counter-culture, including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, LeRoi Jones and Robert Creeley. It also ran a selection of the early work of a maverick ...”

“... about abstraction. He joined a London exhibiting group headed by Ben Nicholson, whose pure white reliefs were the nearest indigenous parallel to the work of Continental avantgardists such as Mondrian, and devised his own handsomely workmanlike ‘Constructions’. In 1935 Piper’s girlfriend Myfanwy Evans launched Axis, a review of ...”

“... up and down the shires since then, we have seen disturbances caused largely by youths who were white, employed, affluent and drunk. Where were the Police on these occasions? They were there of course, under attack. Not, generally, because of any reasoned resentment against the Police, but simply because they were handy targets for those seeking violent ...”

“... of Health, spurred on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts ...”

“... starl. No sense of starl.’ He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more ...”

“... bloody work of healing and not flinch. Their gazes, arms, hands, even (in a brilliant touch) the white slash of the anaesthetist’s hairparting, all converge on the incision, the red wound and hand, so harsh and sudden against the swooning white thigh and the black coats.’ Composition, colour and pictorial focus ...”

“... from campaigning or taking office even if convicted. Under the constitution a candidate for the White House needs only to be 35 years of age, a ‘natural born’ citizen and a resident of the country for fourteen years. Those who drafted the constitution were too preoccupied with managing disagreements over slavery and representation to concern themselves ...”

“... benefits of the Polar industry – the biopics, the biographies, the inexplicable determination of Kenneth Branagh (of Shackleton) to out-act John Mills (of Scott of the Antarctic), the retellings of modern legends about the explorers freezing and dying and writing poetry as they did so. But Tromsø is almost empty. There seem to be hardly any tourists, though ...”

“... impersonate the novelist. The audience gradually got the joke as Corey, who was once described by Kenneth Tynan as a ‘travesty of all that our civilisation holds dear and one of the funniest grotesques in America’, accepted the ‘stipend’ on behalf of ‘Richard Python’. ‘The great fiction story is now being rehearsed before our very eyes, in the ...”

“... feature of the ‘American exceptionalism’ celebrated in the introduction. He identifies white supremacy as another constitutive feature of the United States, one that became ever more pervasive after the Emancipation Proclamation, and one which, according to Evans, white Americans have had more difficulty coming ...”