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“... Mitford’s humour is its preparedness to be cruel. The account in this volume of Alan Lennox-Boyd swelling to twice his normal size because a doctor had mistakenly injected him with elephantiasis would, indeed, make you scream. Here is an other letter which exemplifies her humour: Darling I must describe a visit to the Joneses – the angelic Enid ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... by Robert Merton: ‘If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.’ David Edgerton’s The Shock of the Old, with its ironic echoes of bestsellers by Robert Hughes and Alvin Toffler, is not an attack on innovation as such. Rather, it is a call for a new way of thinking about technological change, not as a sequence of ...”

“... the 1832 Reform Act was passed in the House of Commons on 23 March 1831 by a single vote. As Boyd Hilton writes in A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People: ‘The decisive vote was that of John Calcraft, who . . . finding his own seat threatened with disfranchisement, spoke violently against the Reform Bill, but changed his mind at the last moment, and voted ...”

“... French’s Bleeding Heart, Malcolm Bradbury’s Stepping Westward and Rates of Exchange, and David Lodge’s Changing Places and Small World. Now, all around the large cabin, other refugees from Roger Moore in For Your Eyes Only and from Gene Wilder in The Woman in Red have their noses stuck into novels. Could it be that a certain kind of novel is being ...”

“... Julian Barnes’s diary). He records meeting, in the same week, Princess Margaret, Ionesco and David Hockney. David Bowie offers to take over a part in The Real Thing; the Duchess of Devonshire appears as ‘Debo’ on page 33. Stoppard is not unaware of the effect: ‘I’m getting quite impressed by some of our ...”

“... with a couple of dozen other stalwarts to listen to them – the likes of Séamus Healy, Richard Boyd Barrett and Thomas Pringle, all now catapulted into the Dáil with a mandate to disturb the political peace. While the Fianna Fáil aristocracy were punching their cards at local meetings and stealthily ascending the party ladder, these newcomers spent their ...”

“... victory in 1945 brought opportunity to high-minded persons from more than one political tradition. Boyd Orr the medical reformer and Julian Huxley the socially-conscious scientist helped to set up Unesco. William Beveridge, a Liberal, saw his Welfare State largely enacted; Creech Jones, chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau which had been founded in ...”

“... of surname – the Dawkins in question was the geologist and palaeontologist Sir William Boyd Dawkins, not a direct ancestor, if ancestor at all, of the present carrier of the Darwin meme – before Johnson has recovered from his spiritual despond. In a twinkling he has reconciled God and Darwin. Thereafter his magnificent self-confidence never ...”

“... by Francis Wyndham, an account of a black sheep step-brother; ‘Remembrance’ by Susan Boyd, which touches on the subject of a dead grandmother; and ‘Trotsky’s Other Son’ by Carol Singh, a story describing a Marxist who ran a bookshop in a Nottingham slum in the early Sixties. ‘Women with Bicycle’ by Jane Oxenford and the brief ‘Having ...”

“... 1959 composition ‘Peace’, with Geri Allen on piano. The tenor saxophonists Joe Lovano and David Murray howled their way through Coleman’s most famous tune, ‘Lonely Woman’. There was a haunting duet between Henry Threadgill, on alto flute, and Jason Moran, on piano, and an electric dialogue between the drummer Jack DeJohnette and the tap dancer ...”

“... Moore about sketching people in London air-raid shelters. Facts, though, aren’t everything, as David Cecil argued early in 1941, in an article lamenting the propagandist pressures being brought to bear on artists. Prisoners of war were commended for escaping, he pointed out. Why shouldn’t writers be escapists, too? This was itself a shocking thing to ...”

“... defeat. An honest review of the record casts the British naval leadership in a very poor light. As David Lloyd George explained in his memoirs, ‘before the War, the Board of Admiralty had concentrated so much on big and still bigger ships that they neglected essential weapons like mines, armour-piercing shells and torpedoes – all of which were inferior to ...”

“... privacy is even now being fiercely defended by Stephen Spender against the intrusive Hugh David. There has recently been the quarrel between Nabokov’s biographers – the publishing rascal Andrew Field and friend of the family, Brian Boyd. Should Diane Middlebrook have had access to Anne Sexton’s psychiatric ...”

“... said that unless the German army withdrew it would mean war. ‘Broken-hearted I begged David Margesson to do something but he was determined. “It must be war, Chips, old boy.”’ When the declaration came the following morning, Channon felt that ‘our old world or all that remains of it, is committing suicide, whilst Stalin laughs.’But for ...”