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“... Brigaders, Trotskyites, Communists, pacifists failed by their tribunals. The playwright David Hare declared recently that working-class conscripts now met ‘the officer class’ for the first time and rebelled; but plenty had met the people issuing orders, at least since Peterloo. Moreover, an Army largely unemployed except in training or retreat ...”

“... Hemingway marathon, to the fling with James Gavin (hero of the 82nd Airborne), to the affair with David Gurewitsch in Cuernavaca, even the marriage to Tom Matthews in 1954 that made her so ‘plain silly happy’ at first: You see, I have chalked it up too well, and see where and how I am caught – and how ...”

“... of the latest supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography there are photographs of David Niven, Diana Dors, Eric Morecambe, John Betjeman and William Walton. Dors has a leering ‘Come up and read me sometime’ expression on her face and Niven wears his yacht-club greeter’s smile. Morecambe seems to be laughing at one of his own ...”

“... forestall their [defection] or to cover their trail.’ Perhaps. Yet it was the British Communist David Crook who did most of the spying on the Orwells – and, according to Gordon Bowker in his biography of Orwell, Crook went on to suggest that Eileen was having an affair with Kopp. The snakepit from which the Orrs scrambled when they left for France was ...”

“... English) is itself impressive: Noam Chomsky, Ruth Kempson, Sidney Greenbaum, Dwight Bolinger, P.H. Matthews, Sven Jacobson, M.A.K. Halliday, Rodney Huddleston, Geoffrey Leech, Jennifer Coates, F.R. Palmer, R.A. Close, John Sinclair, Jan Firbas, Nils Enkvist, David Crystal, Jan Svartvik, Wolf-Dietrich Bald, Nelson ...”

“... of accountancy constituting the present. All the successors, the amiable if cack-handed Victor Matthews, his feverish mayor of the palace, Jocelyn Stevens, and subsequent persons deepening the descent, still aspired to Beaverbrook’s peremptory ways, his habit of punting enthusiasms and nominating heroes. All that was missing was the flair. One can’t ...”

“... that the Fleet Street crisis of the mid-Seventies and the advent of entrepreneurs such as Lord Matthews (whose property company now controls the Express), Rupert Murdoch and ‘Tiny’ Rowland of Lonrho would have been sufficient cause for the public and Parliament to take a more serious interest in the state of the press than the lame-duck exercise ...”

“... benign among proprietors, has come and gone, picking up a peerage in the process. So has Victor Matthews, moving from building-site to Fleet Street and out again in less than ten years. The free or cut-price offers of dictionaries and flower-pots in the 1930s have given way to bingo and cash prizes. As for content, most of the popular papers are as cheap ...”

“... prints interviews with them, as if they were as respectable as the Shah of Iran. Dickson mentions David Bailey, who published a handsome photograph of the Twins, with an eloquent caption by Francis Wyndham, comparing them with Humphrey Bogart. It was the little public-school gang of Private Eye that broke through the hype: larger journals seemed awed by the ...”

“... controls these proceedings with a Catoesque monomania and a forensically inflexible vocabulary. As David Edgar has pointed out, Dutt is the one person in the whole drama who takes exactly the same line at the beginning, the middle and the end. He is determined, not just that the Central Committee should bow to Big Brother but that they should love him ...”

“... miniatures of the uncontroversial heroism of doomed men. It’s beyond history; it’s myth. David Boyd Haycock’s I Am Spain: The Spanish Civil War and the Men and Women Who Went to Fight Fascism is a good example of where this Civil War mythology tends to wind up. He replaces Baxell’s careful scholarship with broad-brush sentimentality. They tell ...”

“... rubbish but a well-plotted light comedy written by William Douglas Home, with the legendary A.E. Matthews, Cecil Parker and David Tomlinson. I know the play well, or should, having been in it at school in the Tomlinson part. After a succession of female roles (including Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew), my voice had ...”

“... are likely to stir tabloid echoes in the reader’s mind, and before too long the name of Shannon Matthews will pop up – but Hensher is too wily to follow that case very closely, and enjoys laying a trail that combines real clues and pieces of misdirection. The trick of incorporating genre features into a literary novel, to judge by such successes as The ...”

“... subcultures made him uneasy; he did not like socialising with gay couples. His assistant, Colin Matthews, ‘thought the repression extended to all brands of sexuality, not merely his own’. He was most himself, it seems, when permitted to enter into avuncular relations with handsome teenage boys, sex kept at bay – but the scene also charged – by ...”

“... together on that basis. Initially, Sampson suggests that its author was the black academic, Z.K. Matthews, but he goes on to admit that it was drafted by the white Communist, Lionel Bernstein. The Congress itself was stage-managed: on the first day the Charter was simply recited to the delegates, who accepted it ‘by acclaim’, which meant that the front ...”