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“... J.R. and M.C. Jacob have produced new and exciting syntheses in the grand manner. The object of Dr Hunter’s book is to reconsider the ‘academic dimension’ of the new science, and its institutions. He avoids ‘uncritical counting of heads’ as a means of deciding how many Fellows of the Royal Society were ‘Puritans’. The answer, of course, always ...”

“... the first place because, as a Royalist in 1650s, there were no openings for him in public life. As Michael Hunter suggested in his contribution to the 1998 colloquium, Evelyn’s subsequent career as connoisseur, savant and writer was something of a pis aller. Elysium Britannicum is thus a not-altogether-easy mixture of Royalist politics, modern ...”

“... the war in Vietnam were slow in coming. Saigon fell in 1975, and Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter both date from 1978. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was 1979. In their separate ways these films were all about damage done to Americans; any damage done to others was ...”

“... Since then, a number of historians have tried their hand at the prosopography of the saints. Michael Goodich has attempted to draw ‘a profile of 13th-century sainthood’, André Vauchez has studied the later Middle Ages, and now two specialists in Italian history, Donald Weinstein and Rudolph Bell, have surveyed the whole of Western Christendom from ...”

“... discounted it wouldn’t have made any difference: the new Conservative MP for Basingstoke, Andrew Hunter, would just have been elected with a majority of 12,451 rather than 12,450. Hunter won’t be seeking re-election in May, having seen his majority – which peaked in 1992 at 21,198, making Basingstoke an apparently ...”

“... of Hungarian nerve, social bluff and show-business instinct once commanded the British cinema. In Michael Korda’s telling, however, the panorama of picture-making is not always alight with understanding or information. The author may have been born on the night in 1933 when his uncle Alexander Korda’s first great success, The Private Life of Henry ...”

“... the chance to speak in an unmediated first person fulfilled a more urgent necessity. It allowed Michael Herr, on assignment in Vietnam for Esquire and Rolling Stone, to write about his own terror and confusion as he drifted through the war zone, and it allowed Joan Didion, in The White Album, to weave details of her anxious upscale-Californian life into a ...”

“... politics, indeed too much. Instead, a warm welcome for a new book by that indefatigable tramper Hunter Davies. This one is A Walk along the Tracks,* an exploration of the disused railway lines which have now accumulated to 8,000 miles, with no doubt more to come. Some of these lines have been taken over by enlightened local authorities and turned into ...”

“... but without it life would be meaningless as well. Or so the characters come to suspect. Michael Ahearn, the leading man of Stone’s new novel, Bay of Souls, starts out as one of these worldly protagonists. Quietly dissatisfied, fond of the bottle but sustained by the unexamined vestiges of Catholic faith, he teaches American literature in a ...”

“... longer glimpse of Peter Fonda’s entrails than most people will be eager to have (he’s a bounty hunter who’s been shot during the robbery of a coach). In the fantasy style required of current cinema, his body, open entrails notwithstanding, shows no sign of human vulnerability: as soon as the bullet is removed he is riding the trail again with the rest of ...”

“... is set in small-town Texas in the 1950s, when the Sean Penn character was a boy, Jack, played by Hunter McCracken with a worried, stoic stubbornness that is really engaging. All the acting is persuasive, understated, in tune with what we might think of as the quiet strangeness of ordinary life once you stop to look at it. We are watching not so much a piece ...”

“... and sophisticated proto-culture’. Everything that we are today has emerged from the hunter-gatherer tradition. ‘All of our ability, the development of our intellect, all of our early culture grows out of those kinship groups operating overwhelmingly in a co-operative way ... The hunter-gatherer is what ...”

“... to Young’s role, which by the end included going on the run with Edwards’s mistress Rielle Hunter and their love-child (with Young’s own wife and three children in tow), having allowed Edwards to tell the press that he – Young – was the father of Hunter’s baby. How does anyone get into the position of ...”

“... him in that dress, he would be seen cantering away on a long-tailed white barb, in a peagreen duck-hunter, with cream-coloured leather and rose-tinted tops. The Surtees novels are so densely populated by costumes, in such a variety of fashions, fabrics, colours, states of wear and degrees of cleanliness, that they may be experienced as a kind of dream-like ...”

“... A pity, since she seems not to have had a ghost, unlike John Prescott, who was ventriloquised by Hunter Davies; Michael Levy credits a journalist friend, Ned Temko, for his ‘invaluable help, talent and patience’. You certainly don’t hear the Cherie described by ...”