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“... fair book, but I cannot believe that its subject would have liked it any better than he cared for John Campbell’s 1993 biography, Heath’s own copy of which is scrawled with angry marginalia – ‘Nonsense!’, ‘No!’ and ‘Wrong!’ Campbell’s book was less alluring in style, more detailed in its accounts of interminable ...”

“... and Farm Aid, and Red Wedge, and Rock the Vote, and Live 8, Coldplay, U2, the late and the later John Lennon, and perhaps almost as many good causes as there are actors. It can only be a matter of time, surely, before Eminem turns, however briefly, to Christ and begins to walk in the way of righteousness, as Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan, Marvin Gaye, Roy ...”

“... in the freedom struggle. The four political assassinations that define the 1960s – those of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and King – stand in for the very large numbers (almost all black and lost to national public memory) martyred to racial justice. It is now a commonplace that, instead of protecting Southern civil rights workers, the FBI (with ...”

“... his distancing of himself from his fellow blacks.’ This echoes a private communication by Toni Morrison to Rampersad, which the biographer reproduces at length; Morrison’s judgment on Ellison builds up to a damning charge: ‘One contrasts the largeness of Invisible Man with its broad canvas and its wide range of ...”

“... scraps of fish, levitate and break against the back door. A palm reader, Professor Morrisone (Mr Morrison in civvy street), tells Alma that she is a very strong ‘carrier’ of ectoplasm, the substance with which some mediums materialise spirits. Alma’s older sister, Doris, their mum and Alma’s best friend, Rose (the lodger’s sister-in law) come and ...”

“... circuit, but he was less familiar with the recording studio. He was ‘terrible’, his producer John Hammond recalled: ‘Bobby popped every p, hissed every s, and habitually wandered off mike.’ But in another sense he knew just what he was doing. The album was made in just six hours of studio time – two three-hour sessions – at a cost of around ...”

“... Louis XIV for French television. Triggered by an archive clip of his maternal grandfather, Herbert Morrison, another ennobled socialist cabinet minister, Mandelson launched into a memoir of cycling around Hendon, committee room to polling station, bearing leaflets, carrying messages as proudly as the freshly baked loaves in Ridley Scott’s celebrated ...”

“... Two weeks later, Colnbrook detainees sent out by email ‘An Open Petition to the World’. John Reid, they reported, had made a secret inspection of the detention centre yet ‘no asylum seeker ever saw or spoke to the home secretary, he was surrounded by such a crowd of security and bodyguards.’ They also claimed that at Haslar and Harmondsworth ...”

“... Society and £50,000 in a Coutts bank account. There was no family money. His grandfather, Herbert Morrison, left his daughter nothing. Although Mandelson’s salary increased when he briefly served in the Cabinet, the gap between income and outgoings remains dizzying and unexplored. Only the English can dismiss the need to ask impertinent questions of a ...”

“... to Nobby’s and drink nickel draft beers. As a flaneur at the café he ‘read everyone, from John Fante to Aldous Huxley to Lao-tzu. My favourite novel at the time was Charles Bukowski’s Post Office, about a down-and-out barfly – a bleak omen, in retrospect, of where my life would one day land.’ (The epigraph of Beautiful Things is a few lines from ...”

“... the bitter medicine, too. It’s like eating chocolate parfait and bacon (the first thing Treat Morrison notices about Elena McMahon in The Last Thing He Wanted). Let me qualify ‘lovely’. It’s too close to something Didion might have picked up shopping (and she is crazy about clothes – you rarely know what her people look like, but she tells you all ...”

“... Half-pence, which I have read in an English Historian of great probity, and Truth’. ‘Fines Morrison ... was Secretary of State to the Lord Monjoy, our chief Governour, in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth,’ says Sheridan, so he ‘had the best oportunity, of knowing the State of this Nation at that time’. An Irish rebellion led by ringleaders of English ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... girly-boy who hymned his cheap-suit backstreet bohemia over blackout power chords – as Smith’s John the Baptist. Horses betrays a love of early Kinks, Them, Who, but reframes their riffy aesthetic with studied artfulness. How much credit should go to the producer, John Cale, isn’t clear. Smith never sounded this ...”

“... country … The silence, I find, is a factor which has enabled the evil to spread.’ Likewise John Gordon, in the Sunday Express, who seized on John Gielgud’s arrest for importuning in 1953 as a chance to rip aside the ‘protective veil’ of delicacy around this ‘repulsive’ and ‘peculiarly ...”