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“... Mail test’. (The same metric was adopted by the civil servants making funding decisions in Andrew Mitchell’s now defunct Department for International Development.) Serco was fined £19.2 million last year by the Serious Fraud Office for misconduct in its electronic tagging service for the Ministry of Justice. The wrongdoing is said to have included ...”

“... turn someone smiling, loving almost.23 March. Asked by the Guardian if I would like to interview Andrew McMillan, the poet. Though I’m an admirer I say no, only because if I did it would be as much about myself as about McMillan and how his life has been very different from mine.24 March. Rupert asks me about Worship Street, where I lodged in the early ...”

“... preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look Homeward, Angel. As the truck got ...”

“... Major General Campbell, a US commander in Afghanistan, said that ‘any time there’s any sort of leak of classified material, it has the potential to harm the military folks that are working out here every day.’ The notion got under the skin of many people, including many of the journalists dealing with the leaks, and a feeling grew that WikiLeaks must ...”

“... a passage where you weren’t quite clear what you thought and hoped that the vagueness didn’t leak into the text. All the points where you were on thin ice and hoped no one would notice, he noticed. You had no choice except to raise your game. The attention and focus given to editing were all the more impressive because Karl had no romance of editing as ...”

“... Larkin elegies have the authentic plangency of E.J. Thribb. The best, as yet uncollected, is by Andrew Motion, and was first published in the TLS. ‘This is your subject speaking’ is a long poem, with a powerful and complex narrative drive. In the final section, Motion visits Larkin in the nursing-home where he was dying of his cancer:The door to your ...”

“... will be successful,’ he wrote in his diary on their wedding day). There he was introduced to Andrew Bonar Law, another Scots-Canadian son of the manse with a New Brunswick background, who was a rising star in the Unionist (Conservative) Party. It was the beginning of a strange, enduring relationship: Bonar Law as Aitken’s political patron and ...”

“... and Gizmodo stories before Christmas. Wright always said these stories had been provoked by a ‘leak’, the work of a disgruntled employee of his who had stolen a hard drive. In any case, the emails he sent me show a pair of men with shadowy habits – socially undernourished men, I’d say, with a high degree of intellectual ability – operating in a ...”

“... services, imposed from Whitehall.’ Two months later, the new health secretary, the Conservative Andrew Lansley, announced his plans for a top-down reconfiguration of England’s NHS services, imposed from Whitehall. The patient whom Porter was about to operate on was a 60-year-old woman from the Wirral with a complex prosthesis in one leg, running from her ...”

“... claiming that Sulayman was sending Muslims to train in Afghanistan. The Labour MP for Hendon, Andrew Dismore, raised the matter in Parliament. Ten days after the newspaper article was published, Sulayman became the first Muslim to be arrested and detained under the Terrorism Act 2000. He was charged with inviting another to receive weapons training and ...”

“... are you still here?’It’s not that they don’t still fish out of Grimsby. One morning I met Andrew Allard, who runs a ten-vessel outfit called Jubilee Fishing from an office in the docks. When he showed me on a map on the wall where his boats were at that moment I got a sense of the big world of the Grimsby fishermen, how unprovincial it had been to ...”

“... indelible portrait of Mountbatten – that ‘mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’ – to Andrew Roberts. Full of imaginary exploits from the back seat of his Cadillac in Colombo, as figurehead commander of Allied Forces in South-East Asia, he arrived in Delhi overjoyed to be ‘endowed with an almost heavenly power. I realised that I had been made ...”

“... much to the fore. A leading international architect, one of whose airports had recently sprung a leak, came down the centre aisle, waiting at the end of a pew until someone made room, his self-effacing behaviour and downcast eyes proclaiming him a person of some consequence humbled by the circumstances in which he currently found himself and which might have ...”