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“... and the huge ‘official’ one by Donald Sturrock, which, while seeking to bring out the best in Dahl, doesn’t conceal his self-aggrandising side.Through the mid-1960s Dahl wrote film scripts, variously hacked about and supplemented by other hands, including the screenplay for the Bond movie You Only Live Twice. The marriage to Neal had become more ...”

“... As a comment about the fear of brutality this is almost as stupid as Auden’s aphorism (‘The best reason I have for opposing Fascism,’ he wrote in an essay published in 1934, ‘is that at school I lived in a Fascist state’), but without the saving grace of having been made before the full facts of Nazism were known. To write about public school ...”

“... completes his portrait of Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel, Lord Henry Wotton says: ‘It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done. You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. The Grosvenor is really the only place.’ Constance Lloyd’s grandmother and ...”

“... Gerald Percy, a direct descendant of Hotspur (he had a free house too); the former MI5 officer Nicholas Elliott, whose finest hour in the British secret service was to denounce Kim Philby in time for the spy to run to Moscow; and Paul Spicer, Rowland’s devoted bagman, who is well known to every journalist who ever asked a question about Lonrho and had it ...”

“... to rule. The failure of the 1905 Revolution did not gain tsarism much time, and in any case Nicholas II sabotaged his most capable minister, Stolypin; and even his reforms, in Figes’s view, were not ‘capable of stabilising Russia’s social system after the crisis of 1905’. By 1912, urban Russia, he argues (following Leo Haimson’s pioneering ...”

“... The economic side of conversion went further than cupboard love. Christianity was the long-term ‘best buy’. It is true that preachers occasionally had to rely on ad hoc miracles to prove this point, as when Wilfred of York’s preaching in Frisia, in 678, coincided with a bumper harvest. But miracles or no miracles, the fact was that in Northern Europe ...”

“... we can cross-reference the date of the painting with the date on which the sitter gave birth. (In Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of his 22-year-old wife, Alice, from 1578 – a delicate miniature, watercolour on vellum – only the ear of corn and the pink rosebud pinned to her bodice allude to her pregnancy.) If we didn’t know that Princess Anne was born ...”

“... Mendeleev soon found himself in the stifling worlds of academy and bureaucracy. Gordin is at his best documenting the vagaries of tsarist policy and St Petersburg fashion. It was hard for Mendeleev to find a place where he could make his science pay dividends for conservative politics. His private life became the stuff of a quasi-Tolstoyan romance. An ...”

“... do only what they instinctively believe is necessary to protect themselves from harm, this is the best evidence a jury can have that they are acting in lawful self-defence. What stands for people stands also for nations.’ Nicholas Reed Langen in the Church Times was one of many who pointed out that ‘in domestic law, if ...”

“... held mine in place. I said: it’s a good steak,’ and heard like poetry her reply, ‘It’s the best I’ve ever eaten.’ There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the ...”

“... slavery a century and a half after it supposedly ended? These are difficult questions that are not best dealt with in tart formulas about self-inflicted wounds and imperialism being ‘over’. Indian and British, Indochinese and French, American and Native American: the histories are interdependent. Consider Britain’s savage war against ...”

“... two Balkan Wars virtually ended Ottoman power in Europe. It is true that Enver Pasha, perhaps the best-known of the new elite, won huge prestige when he held the city of Edirne for the Empire (Enver Hoxha and Anwar Sadat were two of the thousands of babies to be named after the hero of the hour), but this was small compensation for losing ...”

“... holding in a ‘401(k)’ plan, the most popular savings vehicle in the US, is only $20,000. The best secondary pensions are still DB schemes, and these remain quite common in the public sector, where they enjoy an ultimate government guarantee, making them much more secure than the company-sponsored alternatives. Whether in the public or private sector, DB ...”

“... to the nation if it is what eventually leads to its timely collapse. The resignations are the best-publicised outgrowth of governmental decay. The litany of names reads like the cast-list of some bizarre Antipodean soap: Allan Stewart, wielder of the pick-axe; Michael Mates, sender of the famous watch; Norman Lamont, evictor (with some help from the ...”

“... been brilliantly treated in a collection of essays edited by Jenny Doctor, David Wright and Nicholas Kenyon.* In terms (for instance) of its performing space, the crucial dates were 1893 and 1941 (when the Queen’s Hall was destroyed and the concerts moved to the Albert Hall); in terms of sponsorship and organisation, the key years were 1927 (when the ...”