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“... One day when I was walking down the street You’ll never guess who I did meet. Margaret Thatcher, who got out of a car And went into a Public Bar. Up to the counter she walked briskly And ordered up a pint of Whisky. In came MP Michael Foot – He had been cleaning a chimney and was covered in soot – With the rest of the Labour Party shortly behind ...”

“... in this tradition began to lose their connection with real sunsets and seasons, painters who preferred looking to imagining had a chance to move to the front of the pack. The sources were to hand: 17th-century Dutchmen had shown that common sights could be as gratifying to the eye as dreams. So it is worth checking out the Ruisdaels too, before you ...”

“... them chalking on the walls. People look around in alarm, checking over their shoulders to see who in our backyard I’m offending. ‘Mrs Clayton’s chapel,’ someone says plaintively. Ho, ho, is she? I run to read her door number. It’s No. 60; I’m glad of it. Till now, 58 was the highest number I knew. I frolic outside her door, waiting for her to ...”

“... his being prosecuted for it, consciously breaks a High Court injunction by naming an individual who has been anonymised by court order, it suggests two possibilities. One is that he does not understand the constitution; the other is that he does and has set out to transgress it. In spite of protests from members of both Houses ...”

“... that it’s this.’) Often competitive, they are frequently keen on working with young women, who can be pleasing company whom they don’t feel the need to destroy. At least not intentionally. After hearing my thoughts on the reading, Weinstein declared me bright and said he needed help with a movie he was making. It needed a new voiceover. He and ...”

“... feature Edgar ‘Lefty’ Mendieta, a sardonic, lovelorn policeman fond of drink and classic rock, who is haunted by a childhood trauma. He doesn’t seem to be motivated by any high-minded notions of justice: he arrives at the first crime scene in Silver Bullets thinking, ‘I hope it’s one of those impossible cases, they’re the ones we’re best at ...”

“... They were Derrick Moo Young, aged 53, and his son Duane Moo Young, 23, businessmen from Jamaica who had looked after properties in Fort Lauderdale owned by the man who would be accused of killing them, Krishna Maharaj, a Trinidadian national and British citizen. A few months before the murder, Maharaj had accused the Moo ...”

“... a subsidy to be picked up, whether or not the beef exists as described, or at all. You might say, who cares? No one was going to eat it anyway. But, in fact, the Goodman company was contracted to can a part of the surplus beef as EC food aid to Russia. They creamed off 10 per cent of the quality meat for sale to supermarkets and made up the rest with frozen ...”

“... of leadership, and it is why he believes he was cut out for it while other people (you can guess who) were not. But he also puts it down to his training as a barrister at the hands of Derry Irvine, someone he describes as having ‘a brain the size of a melon’. From Irvine Blair learned the importance of what he calls ‘drilling down’ when ...”

“... money to get power and power to get money. The country is ruled by a narrow, self-serving elite who go through the motions of holding elections and transferring power. No one is fooled. When Putin moves from the office of president to prime minister and then back again, it is not exactly smoke and mirrors stuff. It’s just out one door and in through ...”

“... head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and then Secretary of Education under Reagan, who worked to abolish both agencies, and Lynne Cheney, wife of Dick and head of the NEH under George I, who wanted to absolve American history from any critique whatsoever. (When I’ve seen these two on TV again lately, I’ve ...”

“... has changed its surroundings, the studio is open to light from the street.’ He is shy of saying who he is writing about, but the glittering little pictures Meissonier made of musketeers, horsemen and so forth would fit his description very well. Although Meissonier’s first models were Dutch masters (Terborch and Metsu), the ‘indefinable ...”

“... philosophers’. No doubt the initiated will often be able to guess who is intended, but I suspect that no single person alive will be able to figure out all the references. Be this as it may, the indirect style combines with the taking for granted of psychoanalytic theory to create the impression of a book written for ...”

“... that seem so gloriously brilliant in their diabolic wit    here in the light of day. But who would guess the planning he does deep in the night    tossing on the fetid damp of his sepulchral sheets? For a thirsting man caught here, stranded    late at night between two dry hills, my prayers answered are like ...”

“... by a certain fatalism: a nominal meritocracy produces a class of super-qualified and clever people who are nevertheless shut out of society’s higher-status zones. The world is split between sellouts and burnouts – guess who takes the lion’s share? ‘Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning,’ says Lewis ...”