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“... and when it was clear that Queensberry was in possession of compromising letters, Wilde met Frank Harris and George Bernard Shaw at the Café Royal. When Harris vehemently sought to persuade him to drop the case and leave the country and Shaw agreed, Wilde seemed to be coming around to their view. (‘You are sure to lose ...”

“... occasion for a formal portrait. We hear of the florid complexions and the addiction to alcohol of John George of Saxony and Christian IV of Denmark, of the ‘mouse-coloured hair’ and shrill voice of the Elector Maximilian of Bavaria, of the habitual kneeling and hunting of the Emperor Ferdinand II, of the royal bearing of Gustav Adolf of Sweden, and the ...”

“... Vogue, got into drugs and died – or ‘astro-projected’ – in 1971, aged 28. As with the Jean Harris and Claus von Bulow dramas which were the CTPs of my last two visits to New York, the tale of Edie offers rich lashings of upper-crust unpleasantness. The Sedgwicks are one of the New England families and much of the book’s appeal is in watching all that ...”

“... for a second term in 2024, at the age of 81, or be replaced by a pundit’s dream ticket of Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg. The spectre of Trump remains, at least in the obsessive minds of those who believe the vandalism done to the Capitol on 6 January was a catastrophe on a par with 9/11. Asked about reports that Trump knowingly exposed him to Covid-19 ...”

“... kind impeccably displayed by Al Pacino and Robert de Niro in Heat; and in Miami Vice both José (John Ortiz) and Jesus (Luis Tosar) make a fair show of being as sinister as they are supposed to be. The problem is that Colin Farrell, as Crockett, is not up to this kind of self-parody, and Jamie Foxx, as Tubbs, who probably is up to it, doesn’t get a chance ...”

“... in a Bond film or is it an allusion to, say, the opening of For Your Eyes Only, in which Blofeld (John Hollis) traps Bond (Moore) in a remote-controlled helicopter until Bond takes control of it, scoops up Blofeld’s wheelchair with the chopper’s leg and dumps him down a chimney? (This was Bond at peak camp; before the big drop Blofeld begs: ‘We can do a ...”

“... went up, and in May 2007 Fianna Fáil won a third consecutive term in office. As the columnist John Waters said, ‘people chose to take the most benign view of Bertie Ahern’s situation because they thought he was a steady hand on the tiller economically. They didn’t trust the opposition, so they translated that into a trust in his integrity.’ Ahern ...”

“... where the Second Continental Congress is refusing to debate a proposal for American independence. John Adams hops back and forth, his diction slicing the King’s English into definitive new states. Thomas Jefferson, dressed in mauve, so sexual he can barely speak coherently, lounges on the window seat in a soft-focus rapist’s reverie, dreaming of not ...”

“... Man are the two ‘foundation texts’ of the English working-class movement. It is above all in John Bunyan, he argues, that we find ‘the slumbering Radicalism’ which was preserved through the 18th century, and broke out again and again in the 19th. Bunyan was born in a cottage on the edge of Elstow, a village near Bedford, in November 1628. His father ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... by the pathos and surprising detail of lives rarely chronicled elsewhere. There is poor René Harris, a Catholic organ-maker in Augustan London eager to improve himself. We learn that someone this marginal nonetheless wanted and was able to commission a portrait of his wife. But it was while he was away mending organs to pay for such status-objects that ...”

“... chancellor said. ‘They don’t want digital technology. They’re paying for tradition.’ ‘Harris tweed.’ It seemed useful to throw that in, as various people in the room were armour-clad in the steel-blue weave that, so they tell me in Stornoway, is made specifically for the German professor market. ‘Whisky.’ Post-industrial man was making his ...”

“... study.) Two important correspondences in particular have recently come to light: one with James Harris of Salisbury, the author of Hermes, whom Johnson called ‘a prig, and a bad prig’, but who was a warm friend to Fielding, lent him money sometimes, and wrote an unpublished essay on his ‘Life and Genius’; the other concerned with Fielding’s legal ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... had shaken off the dust of Oak Park, Illinois, he was at least in a position to say hullo to John Updike in the office corridor. He had put enough mileage between himself and his origins to achieve urbanity. Yet it takes only a brief comparison between Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories and Updike’s Rabbit novels (or, even more to the point, Updike’s ...”