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“... a nation but something more like a ‘people’, in that purplish after-dinner sense so dear to Winston Churchill: ‘the English-speaking Peoples’ who have spread themselves round a bit, acquired a sense of destiny, retained certain elements of common culture – and never quite got over it. Under Thatcher some of us thought that curse would never go ...”

“... that teachers would always skive if they saw a chance. His remedy was to keep them up to the mark by ‘hope and fear’, and the means of enforcing this felicific calculus was to pay schools for results ascertained by tests. The great engine of quality control currently clumping in clumsy pattens across all sectors of the British educational system is ...”

“... interspersed with passages of potted historical summary (of the sort that begin: ‘In 1946 Winston Churchill had delivered his momentous Iron Curtain speech’). Sayre’s own life and career recede into the background, and we only incidentally learn that, after Harvard, she lived in England for a period, married an Englishman, got involved in film ...”

“... Communist Party. Clearly Lee Meng was an important cog in the gigantic world conspiracy of evil. Winston Churchill told the Commons that ‘there can be no question of bartering a human life.’ But a week or so later, Lee Meng’s sentence was quietly commuted (she served 11 years and was deported to China). This story, it seems to me, illustrates two ...”

“... Don Luis of Spain wore mauve silk pyjamas, the Duchess of Sutherland quite sleepy and bored … Winston Churchill, fat and puffy’ (he was in Paris as minister of munitions).As battle raged in the last week of July, Channon took himself off to the Normandy coast, where he was amused to find the hotel full of ‘very young rosy-faced English officers on ...”

“... still no plaque at the Midland Hotel, Birmingham (now rebranded as the Macdonald Burlington), to mark the spot where Enoch Powell delivered his famous speech on 20 April 1968. Yet of all the speeches delivered by British politicians in the 20th century, or come to that in the 21st, it remains the most memorable, surpassing even the snatches I can recall of ...”

“... hotel’ of residents whose ‘lives revolved around the President and First Lady’. Winston Churchill cabled Clement Attlee on one of his own stays at the White House: ‘We live here as a big family, in the greatest intimacy and familiarity.’ Closest Companion and No Ordinary Time make us guests at the White House as well, visitors who know a ...”

“... psychoanalysts’, and in his ‘apology’ for the volume as a whole he again seems at pains to mark himself as no Freudian and yet as not dismissive of Freud. ‘I violate the biographical laws I began this apology with by telling you little about myself that might not have happened to a thousand Shaws, and a million Smiths. Perhaps our psychoanalysts may ...”

“... in the eyes of a wider public had come with T.E. Lawrence’s judgment in conversation with Winston Churchill, as reported in the Evening Standard in 1934, that Day-Lewis was the one ‘great man’ in the country – ‘present company excepted’. By the late 1930s, his radical ardour cooling, Day-Lewis began to tire of being in the spotlight, and in ...”

“... when he did appear in Julius Caesar, Forrest played the less intellectual and more show-stopping Mark Antony, but he much preferred those Shakespearean roles which allowed him physically to dominate the stage for a large proportion of the play and then to finish on a spectacular death: roles like Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and, above ...”

“... Düsseldorf. In a room heavy with air freshener, scattered with home décor magazines and tomes by Winston Churchill, loudspeakers broadcast muzak while the artists sat in comfy armchairs, one of them reading a cheap thriller, the other watching a TV news report about the resignation of Konrad Adenauer, the chancellor of the Federal Republic. Richter, Sigmar ...”

“... occupants as simply a provision for his own support & enjoyment!’ The facetious exclamation mark doesn’t even begin to disguise his anxiety about what was going on back home in his presently fatherless family.Only after all these issues have been addressed in detail does Peter get around to what is chiefly on his mind:If, for a time, we stand still or ...”

“... along the boat deck and got into conversation with the elder man. I noticed that there was a mark on the bridge of his nose through wearing spectacles, that he had recently shaved off a moustache, and that he was growing a beard. The young fellow was very reserved, and I remarked about his cough.   ‘Yes,’ said the elder man, ‘my boy has a weak ...”

“... said very truly, belonged to an old, honourable tradition that ought to be revived. It is indeed a mark of political decadence that there has been so little of it against Mrs Thatcher’s regime: none since the war has more deserved it. Treason has never been easy to define precisely, a fact illustrated by the long series of Tudor laws about it. It is an ...”

“... poem was written against a rising tide of mob lynchings in the American South. When Winston Churchill appeared before the US Congress petitioning for American support in the darkest hours of World War Two, he quoted from it without acknowledging the author:If we must die – let it not be like hogsHunted and penned in an inglorious spot,While ...”