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“... letters, screenplays, notebooks and minor stories, but written Brobdingnagian lives of John O’Hara and James Gould Cozzens), produced a sloppy, simple-minded, adoring doorstop of a biography entitled Some Sort of Epic Grandeur. André Le Vot, a French scholar, followed in 1983 with a graceful English translation of his stately, sensitive and ...”

“... he’s been spending his days writing in Central Park. Adventitiously, he becomes the lover of a Sutton Place hostess who turns out to be the live-in maid; when she leaves him for a boyfriend in California, the fabulously rich actual owner of the place hires him as a butler. This leads to an encounter with Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whom he despises, but who’s ...”

“... once he made that choice, he was whole-hearted. He learned English from a female tobacconist in Sutton Coldfield and etiquette from an upper-middle-class nurse. He ended up with a plummy accent, a collection of bow ties and the habit of drinking tea from a bone china cup. For many years he denied his origins: he told the Jewish Chronicle he wasn’t Jewish ...”

“... Gertrude Jekyll lived to see the first waves of the tide of gentility that swept over Surrey until John Betjeman could not look at one of Miss Jekyll’s beloved rhododendrons without thinking of a stockbroker. Less intellectual, in many ways less effective than Morris, she was, nevertheless, in one sense nearer the heart of the issue. In her work as a garden ...”

“... Shortly after the Canary Wharf bomb, John Major, speaking in the House of Commons, said: ‘As for the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA, I think that they are both members one of another.’ Sinn Fein, he continued, would now have to decide whether it wanted to be a constitutional party or continue as a front for the IRA ...”

“... Crisp, who began life as Denis Pratt, found his way to bohemia from the Pooterland of Egmont Road, Sutton. O’Connor spent a significant part of his tumultuous life in Dorking, a fact which the local historian June Spong was understandably disinclined to believe when Barrow approached her for his research. Mrs Spong thought O’Connor’s memories ‘mostly ...”

“... hitmen (Brian ‘The Milkman’ Wright, ‘during his drug-dealing days he always delivered’; John ‘Goldfinger’ Palmer, once ‘one of Britain’s richest men, owning a fleet of private planes, helicopters, boats and cars’), and every few pages there’s a soap star in her knickers, usually followed by a report, written with barely contained ...”

“... and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588. Somewhere to leeward, in spite of the fierce running battle of Gravelines two days before, there were still great bodies of disciplined Spanish ...”

“... some context for the subsequent doings of Lieutenant William Calley and his comrades. Adviser Mike Sutton one day landed in a Huey helicopter in a Delta hamlet where a limp figure was hanging from ropes lashed to a tree – the village chief, disembowelled during the night by Vietcong guerrillas. His wife had been less artistically murdered, their son ...”

“... wound.’Gardner’s book was sent to the publishers in November 1939, and like the excavation at Sutton Hoo earlier that year, must have seemed an almost quixotic gesture of faith in permanence and continuity at a time when general destruction was in prospect and alabaster tombs and Saxon burial ships were hardly top priorities.26 August. Switch on the ...”

“... and that agents are entitled to their share. It was a shock in 1995 when the centre-forward Chris Sutton signed for Blackburn Rovers at £10,000 a week. Now that seems quaint beside the £198,000 a week Manchester City pay the Argentinian striker Carlos Tevez. Clubs have consistently overspent, whatever their revenues, on the wages of players who might keep ...”

“... Waldorf’s colossal wealth and the fact that he preceded her as the Conservative MP for Plymouth Sutton. In fact, she already had experience of doorstepping: ‘For 11 years, I helped my husband with his work in Plymouth. I found out the wrongs and he tried to right them.’ The idea of Nancy standing only arose when Waldorf’s father, William Astor, died ...”

“... sweatshop version of Vivienne Westwood. There are jokey names (Page and Turner for a publisher, John Elton for an American literary agent with a disfiguring hair transplant) and passages of broad pastiche, such as this from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for ...”

“... paper ‘Chain Effects: The Impact of Academy Chains on Low-Income Students’ (2014), the Sutton Trust found that both Ark and Harris seem good at closing the gaps you often find in attainment data between advantaged and disadvantaged children, a finding that echoes work done on the best of the US charter schools, which appear to do notably well by ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”