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“... been any age, but she was not.’ If there are such things as very good bad books, one must be Margaret Kennedy’s The Constant Nymph. Taking down my mother’s copy (the seventh impression in the first few months of publication), I can feel the good bad enticement at once. Here I am in the high Alpine meadows, with a wild musical family (unashamedly ...”

“... for her a new plot, outside the accepted romantic tradition. Her authors are Dorothy Sayers, Margaret Kennedy, Muriel Jaeger, Doreen Wallace, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby. In Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby: A Working Partnership, Jean Kennard looks at their experiment in friendship as an idea of ‘the second self, someone close enough to be ...”

“... conducting the negotiations with Henry VII that led to the marriage two years later of Princess Margaret Tudor to James IV. ‘London thow art of Towynys A per se’, an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a ...”

“... My problems began​ in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking about me when she spoke of a young man who had just lost his mother. Francis Pym said, ‘Guns fire from Number 10’ on the Sarah Kennedy show ...”

“... of this book comes from a television critic’s shrewd observation: ‘Whenever I see Mr Ludovic Kennedy in a television studio, he gives me the impression that he has been good enough to drop by to see if he can lend a hand while on the way to the club.’ A comparable judgment, also quoted in the book, appeared in the Times after Mr ...”

“... a city was Glasgow!’ This sense of a city crowded with narratives is echoed in A.L. Kennedy’s short story ‘The Role of Notable Silences in Scottish History’, where she describes walking through Glasgow as ‘strolling across a book, something big and Victorian with plenty of plots. It makes you wonder who’s reading you.’ By ...”

“... and as rambunctious as any crowd of kids in a Frank Capra film. They are presided over by Joseph Kennedy, a fabulously successful self-made father with connections in Hollywood, Wall Street, Washington and London, and by Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, a devout but fashionable Catholic mum, as at home on the golf links or the ski ...”

“... of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of his short stories. Yet even such wariness reinforces a sense that these issues are worth ...”

“... sketching them, having discovered a talent for making likenesses. The Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon, Archbishop Makarios and Adolf Eichmann all sat for portraits. He was an invitee at all the fashionable parties, and a man who specialised in providing fun for his friends. Keeler met him when she was a showgirl and moved into his ...”

“... ago, during an American Presidential election, rumours began to circulate that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development. ‘If Teddy Kennedy is serious,’ Nixon is alleged to have ...”

“... down strikes, and who – as depicted by Howard – was, of course, an indirect representation of Margaret Thatcher. It was not to be expected that Michael Howard’s achievements as a publicist would be reflected in the scholarly contributions of pupils and friends to his festschrift. Of the 17 contributors, all but one – the former Chief of Defence ...”

“... in the garden of England, he couldn’t resist taking a picture of one of the guests – Princess Margaret. With arms folded and eyebrows arched, she gave his lens a very fishy look, as if to say, how did the press get in? But Dunne was honestly star-struck, and how was he ever to prove he had been there, seen her, if he didn’t snap the Princess and grin ...”

“... to frequent moments of absurdity. For instance, a female character in one of the poems is called Margaret, so we are told that ‘close to the time when’ (but far from the place where) Halleck wrote this poem, ‘Margaret’ was an alternative term for the ‘mollies’ (cross-dressing, man-loving men) of old ...”

“... lacking in genuine affection’. According to the ‘double bind’ theory, as formulated by Margaret Mead’s husband, the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, the schizophrenogenic mother was always setting impossible traps for her child, for example, saying ‘Come here’ or ‘Give me a kiss’ and then stiffening or flinching at his touch. ‘He is ...”

“... from the single-issue elections of the last twenty years. Carter has refused to debate Edward Kennedy, and now John Anderson, and thus Reagan. Reagan in turn has been bound and gagged by his advisers, their hostage rather than their boss, in the apparent belief that he cannot live up to the media pitches devised by them on his behalf. There has ...”