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“... au Magistrat’, though without saying where or when. I am grateful to the sharp eyes of Andrew Wilson, who spotted the Mountjoy reference by chance (or by alphabetical serendipity: he was researching a family ancestor called Merryweather) and kindly shared it with me. The story, such as it can be reconstructed, is contained in two sets of court ...”

“... second, you should possibly grow a moustache and pretend you once had friends called ‘Tug’ Wilson, ‘Strangely’ Brown, ‘Spud’ Murphy and ‘Spider’ Webb. Lovely blokes, the lot of them. Diamond geezers. Never backwards at coming forwards. Credit to their ...”

“... Joe? Certainly, the Civil War had given Hemingway a soft spot for communist saboteurs – Edmund Wilson had swatted him as ‘the Hotel Florida Stalinist’ – but it also reconciled him to a few anti-fascist power brokers at home, such as the treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr, for whom Hemingway agreed to ‘look into’ the Chinese during a trip to ...”

“... an abuse of power to deploy the royal prerogative to supplant the authority of Parliament? Lord Wilson at one point spoke for the Roundheads. ‘This phrase “from time to time”,’ he asked, ‘is that simply talking about changes in European law, changes from time to time in European law, or do you say that the phrase also encompasses rights being ...”

“... and the Philippines ought not to be compared to the despotic actions of European powers. Woodrow Wilson insisted that only the US possessed the combination of military power and moral righteousness to make the world safe for democracy. Like Ferguson, Fred Anderson and Andrew Cayton begin with the premise that the US has ...”

“... to edit the Quarterly. But for the magazine’s first twenty-five years, its mainstay was John Wilson. As Christopher North, he wrote mountains of copy. Reviews, feature articles, verses, sentimental tales of peasant life, unsentimental tales of gothic horror: he churned the stuff out in heroic bouts of scribbling that tested his physical strength as much ...”

“... came to mind some weeks ago when most of the newspapers were full of the libel action between Andrew Neil of the Sunday Times and Peregrine Worsthorne of the Sunday Telegraph. It came to be widely accepted that this trial represented a clash between an Old Britain personified by Mr Worsthorne and a New Britain exemplified by the man Private Eye calls ...”

“... itself. All these intriguing details, and many more of a similar nature, are squirrelled away in Andrew Adonis’s extraordinary lumber-room of a book. My first visit to the Other Place, some thirty years ago, remains a vivid memory because the conditions were so similar to those described by Adonis. After recovering from the vertigo induced by stepping out ...”

“... art being Guy Liddell. The development of this intelligence community is the theme of Christopher Andrew’s book, which contains the first reliable narrative history of the secret services from Victorian days to the present. Needless to say, he has received no encouragement from Whitehall, and former members of MI5 have been warned not to talk to him. As he ...”

“... of punk, the most interesting spot on the planet for anyone interested in rock music. Tony Wilson, a rock show host and frenetic gadabout who ran club nights in the city for unsigned bands, established Factory Records, which then released the work of Joy Division, New Order, A Certain Ratio, The Durutti Column and other new-wave upstarts with big ...”

“... Larkin and John Wain knew one another at Oxford, but had little to do with autodidacts like Colin Wilson, John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe – this last name less often mentioned in this context than might have been expected, doubtless because Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) was published a little too late to be fitted into the fashionable ...”

“... the quantities of the seasonings were wrong – no quantities are given in Apicius, so I consulted Andrew Dalby and Sally Grainger’s Classical Cookbook (1996) – but whatever the amount, the food would have seemed weird to our untrained stomachs. The later Romans, we thought, as we gargled with fizzy water to take the taste away, must have had very odd ...”

“... being closely attended to, even feared, by ministers and by the public. And it was feared. Harold Wilson’s 1964-70 and 1974-76 Governments and James Callaghan’s 1976-79 Administration spent more time cajoling, ‘standing up to’, browbeating, placating and schmoozing with union leaders than with any other group. Robert Taylor’s close account of the ...”

“... reader stimulated, mildly infuriated, and seriously baffled. ‘Final exams were over.’ Deirdre Wilson’s first sentence snaps at the reader. Anyone who doesn’t know from personal experience what finals are should probably go no further. This novel is not for the unlettered. Slave of the Passions ponders the great question whether there is life after ...”

“... firmly and mistakenly that books about the monarchy always sell. The exceptional success of Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story suggested that sycophantic royal biographies were out, and savage royal exposés were in. Hence the commissioning of a spate of Mortonesque knife-jobs. It was also supposed that what the Sun called the Queen’s bum year ...”