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“... in 2015? George and Ed are trying to hoover up the crumbs left by Rory (Stewart) and Alastair (Campbell), whose podcast, The Rest Is Politics, is a freak sensation – even selling out the Royal Albert Hall for a live recording – and a source of succulent profit. George and Ed, we know, are real good pals, but Rory and Alastair were an arranged ...”

“... The United Kingdom is a good place in which to assemble a book of sceptical essays about human rights, but was 2001 a good year in which to do it? True, by then Scotland and Wales had operative devolution statutes which obliged their Governments to observe the European Convention on Human Rights in all they did; and some interesting decisions had already been thrown up north of the border ...”

“... of William Blake intoning ‘Ah, Sunflower’ to him ‘like God had a human voice’. James Campbell, who introduces a note of irony into his reworking of twice-told Beat tales, refers to Ginsberg’s historic undergraduate illumination as ‘hand-held’ – perhaps an allusion to a key detail in what he had said to me: the fact that an act of ...”

“... When Tom Hopkinson was nine years old his father called the family together. He had decided, he said, to become a clergyman. Later he told his son that he had been persuaded to take this long-contemplated step by hearing a sermon ‘so distracted and confused that he had realised the clergyman delivering it must be overwhelmed with the burden of his work ...”

“... years later, so they can say: ‘I knew it all along.’ There is also the strange case of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, who gave Hubbard his big break by letting him write a ‘fact article’ on Dianetics. Campbell, for all his faults, was sceptical well past the point of iconoclasm: in 1960, for instance, he ...”

“... the floor. There is a cat too, I think, but things take a good deal longer to happen than in Tom and Jerry and I didn’t have time to wait for it. However, I did sit long enough among the jumpy pixellated images to feel, for a while, that there was a self-denying lesson implied – something along the lines that all art is a distraction from proper ...”

“... backed at the cover meeting. It isn’t a new phenomenon; in a scene in The Seven Year Itch, Tom Ewell lowers the necklines on the cover art of an edition of Little Women with, if I remember rightly, sweeping curves of his pen. The design that really offers a ‘subtle and intimate promise of what the writer has contrived’ is rare. Lettering sometimes ...”

“... Turner’s remark ‘Had Tom Girtin lived, I should have starved’ is as good a posthumous puff as any artist ever gave another. It’s printed on the back of Tate Britain’s Girtin catalogue. There it reads as a challenge. It puts you on your mettle as you walk past the many pictures whose original effect must be reconstructed from sheets that time has rendered curiously rusty or unnaturally blue ...”

“... in paint or on film, by another artist.What makes one go on looking at the selection from Tom Phillips’s collection of fifty thousand photographic postcards, also at the Portrait Gallery, until 20 June, is what Beaton was good at hiding: the heterogeneity of the unmasked human face. In the terms of this exhibition, a ‘photographic postcard’ is ...”

“... as common then as now. The last plate in Hogarth’s Four Stages of Cruelty shows the cadaver of Tom Nero, hanged for his crimes, being anatomised in the Cutlerian Theatre of the Royal College of Physicians: ‘Those Eyeballs from their Sockets wrung,/That glow’d with lawless Lust!’ The first impression is that cruelty is being met with cruelty: the ...”

“... nothing but ‘monishing and stripes’. Or as an Irish classmate said sadly to C.S. Lewis at Campbell College more than four centuries later: ‘This time last month, I wouldn’t have been going in to Preparation, I’d have a wee tea-cloth laid for me at one end of the table and sausages to my tea.’ ‘Prep’, ‘parsing’, ‘forms’, which were ...”

“... element in the juxtaposed stories of his cancer treatment and cycling career. The British rider Tom Simpson, who died climbing Mont Ventoux in the 1967 Tour, enters the mythology as a hero falling in battle rather than the victim of a sporting accident. The aesthetics of the bicycle, like that of swords and armour, intimately mixes the heraldic and the ...”

“... savage in Conrad’s steamship.’ He could have added that American literature is too, from Uncle Tom to Nigger Jim to Porgy and Bess and Dilsey in The Sound and the Fury. The Americans, under the guidance first of the great W.E.B DuBois, then of the poets Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown, and next a line of novelists headed by Richard Wright, began the ...”

“... way of carrying on, however pathetically, her position visibly untenable. Or he could do as Henry Campbell-Bannerman did in 1905 and form a minority government simply in order to call an election. In both cases, the Fixed Term Parliaments Act – scheduled for repeal in the Tory manifesto, but still very much alive and kicking on the statute book – would ...”

“... war on poverty, and poverty won.’ Amiable? Britney Spears – will her oldest fan, Alistair Campbell, help her run for President in 2004? – has co-written with her mother a not-in-the-slightest-bit-autobiographical novel about a teenager who becomes a pop star. Some say, however, that A Mother’s Gift (Boxtree, £9.99) was ghostwritten by ...”