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“... If​ you are British and no longer young, the title for a brand new Philip Larkin poem is liable to enter your head at least once a day. This morning it was ‘Order of Service’. It’s not as good as ‘High Windows’ or ‘Dockery and Son’, but it has the same doleful ebb. Searching in an old folder, I found an order of service for Larkin’s memorial at Westminster Abbey on 14 February 1986 ...”

“... anti-fascist celebrities: Heinrich and Golo Mann, Hannah Arendt, Anna Seghers, Simone Weil, Arthur Koestler, Victor Serge, Walter Benjamin, Franz Werfel and his wife Alma Mahler, Lion Feuchtwanger, Konrad Heiden (Hitler’s first truthful biographer), Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Moïse Kisling, the young Claude ...”

“... and ruin them. At the same time, there was a culture of male rakishness in the big city. The ‘young sports’, as they were known, were patrons of Anderson’s. Their interests lay in ‘the Sports of the Ring, the Turf, City life, such as Sprees, Larks, Crim-Cons, seductions, rapes’. When Mary died, Bennett’s paper promoted the idea that she had been ...”

“... intention of translating Dostoevsky and Gogol. Soon after his arrival the Japanese attacked Port Arthur: Baring offered himself to the Morning Post as a correspondent, and set off to cover the campaign in Manchuria, attaching himself to a Cossack horse artillery battery. Later he sent back reports on the Russian revolution of 1905, and, travelling backwards ...”

“... beautiful, and range from sweet girls next door to more feisty types like Ginger Rogers and Jean Arthur, Myrna Loy, June Allyson and Jeanne Crain belong here, and their purpose is to reassure the women in the audience and reaffirm the goals of society. Exaggerated women is the category with the biggest stars: ‘ferocious women like Joan Crawford, Bette ...”

“... pride was replaced by retrospective anger at those senior strategists, like Air Marshal Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris, who from safe offices and Ops Rooms sent so many young men to futile and agonising deaths. The Dam Busters was made in 1954, when the myth of Bomber Command’s strategic success was still relatively ...”

“... dreamed of as a boy poring over Jock of the Bushveld’, and, incidentally, crossed the tracks of Arthur Rimbaud, who had trekked up and down those ‘routes horribles’ forty years before. The Danakil journey set the pattern for a life that turned into a perpetual tramp through the wilderness: as officer in the Sudan Political Service; in the Empty ...”

“... a dying man’s eyes. This is where things go half-baked. In Johnny’s delirium, pictured as a J. Arthur Rank version of Expressionism, the paintings in the artist’s room line up as an audience or congregation, and a priest, Father Tom, hovers among them, trying to make himself heard over an actual conversation between the artist and his friend on the ...”

“... in the war. In Moscow, he formed a close alliance with the American Raymond Robins and a young Arthur Ransome, far the best-informed foreign correspondent in the country. Robins, a personal envoy of Woodrow Wilson’s, urged full recognition of the Bolshevik regime. Ransome, who knew the team around Lenin and had won their trust, passionately ...”

“... himself as absurd as the old knight – that if Becker is an ‘old wolf’ then Lawrence is a young fox. The passage is comic because of the overstatement, as if ‘naked liberty’ could possibly be an adequate opposition to ‘security and bank-balance and power’. Stylistically, the passage is comic because it is built on contradictions: the two hate ...”

“... of things in life: politics and stuff. I don’t. Apart from when I was a child knowing that the Young Conservatives in Clapham, where I grew up, had a much better ping-pong table than Young Labour, and that made me a member of the Young Conservatives for quite a time. Priorities.GP: How ...”

“... the Ashmolean’s collection of copies of Greek antiquities, recently acquired by its keeper, Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the palace of Knossos. Several objects, including a fragment of a mural showing a wasp-waisted Minoan jumping over the horns of a bull, she revisited again and again. ‘He seemed not to leap, but to hang above the bull, like a ...”

“... from Salford to Whitefield via Prestwich. The Jacobsons evidently made it to Prestwich. The young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge. His subsequent academic career started at Selwyn College, diverted to Sydney University and ended, fifteen years on, at Wolverhampton Polytechnic: a downward mobility which Jacobson seems to have ...”

“... a gay poet before the fact. The crux of the matter is his friendship with Joseph Drake, a handsome young doctor. They met in 1813, either in Battery Park or on a ferryboat or at the Ugly Club, a bizarre institution whose members were all beautiful men but had to pretend to appreciate one another’s ugliness. In 1819, Halleck and Drake published a sheaf of ...”