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“... I had come in with the Assange party. ‘Rumoured ghostwriter. Rumour confirmed?’ she wrote. Geoffrey Robertson, for Assange, argued that the person in Sweden who issued the warrant, Marianne Ny, was not, as she described herself, the ‘chief prosecutor’, but a minor prosecutor not qualified to do what she did. This seemed weak to me. I also wondered ...”

“... pink and white. Yellow pom-poms of japonica, horticultural cheerleaders. In a corner, under a high wall that gives away the previous identity of this public park as a decommissioned energy-generating plant, retired workers sway, stiffly and slowly, in t’ai chi ballets. I’m fascinated by the elderly Chinese couple who circle every morning for more than an ...”

“... strenuous imagining than most. Post-colonial? Not really – we are re-colonised over and over. Wall Street shivers, the Australian dollar gets pneumonia; Japan revises its shopping-list, and our coal industry verges on collapse. Britain’s hold began to loosen after World War Two, but our cultural colonisation by the United States was probably effective ...”

“... Frank [Beckett’s brother] can’t resist it much … It is nice to have Morning on one’s wall that is always morning, and a setting out without the coming home.’ Later both men wrote separately to McGreevy to say that they had bumped into one another at a donkey show in Dublin where Beckett had taken his mother, who was, he reported, ‘the picture ...”

“... piss it off – was the windfall tax on profits imposed in 1981 by Mrs Thatcher’s chancellor Geoffrey Howe. (Blair or Brown would never dream of doing anything like that to the City.) But the abolition of exchange controls in 1979 and the increasingly international flow of capital, combined with the abolition of restrictions on trading practices which ...”

“... her predated Major’s rise. Its origins lay in her troubled relationship with Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe, the two most important members of her government. It turned, as did so much about her fall, on the question of Europe. Both Howe, who was foreign secretary (until Major replaced him), and Lawson, who was chancellor (until Major replaced him a few ...”

“... advice from Leonard and Virginia Woolf or Ottoline Morrell, or one or another of the Sitwells or Geoffrey Faber and his wife. Anyone who reads even a portion of this material is bound to wonder how the Eliots managed to stay together as long as they did, and how they remained loyal enough never, so far as is known, to have said anything to anyone, except ...”

“... pressure from Littlechild’s successor as regulator, Callum McCarthy. The writing was on the wall for the Americans. The windfall tax suggested there’d be a tighter regulatory regime under Labour, and shortly after the American buying spree began, wholesale prices for electricity plummeted. There was a rush for the exit. In desperation, the Americans ...”