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“... in the race for Labour’s deputy leadership against the candidate supported by the Tribune Group, John Prescott? Right again. Gordon Brown and Tony Blair. In The Candidate, the great American film about political compromise starring Robert Redford, a young welfare lawyer is persuaded against his instinct to go into politics to change the world. He starts by ...”

“... The new select committee system was launched in 1979 with a characteristic flourish by Norman St John Stevas, then Leader of the House of Commons. MPs were ‘embarking upon a series of changes that could constitute the most important Parliamentary reforms of the century’. The proposals were ‘intended to redress the balance of power’ – as between Parliament and the executive – ‘to enable the House of Commons to do more efficiently the job it has been elected to do ...”

“... first published in 1902, or the more recent The Lake District (1970) by Roy Millward and Adrian Robinson, a book that is perfect of its kind. But what I am asking for is a sense of first-hand experience, which is desirable especially when the subject is our experience as physical beings contriving to live in a physical world. Thompson is a devoted walker ...”

“... fantasy of Joyce in Ulysses than with the free-wheeling American ‘put-on’, the extravagance of John Barth. But, as against repression and silencing, the book bubbles with talk and streams with consciousness – artfully enacting its theme. Two novels about witchcraft carry credentials. The Girl Green as Elderflower is based on medieval sources, which are ...”

“... allies of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a General Forster, whose surname I bear between the ‘John’ and the ‘Woodward’. That relationship comes via my father’s mother, and is, I have to admit, fairly tenuous. These words might in themselves be merely ironic: the self-made man proud of his personal achievement who stresses the obscurity of his ...”

“... in a Boat in the same form, will have a mild idea of the task which faced the Cambridge graduate John Smith (a sizar, married with one child) when in 1819 he was hired to decipher the six volumes of Samuel Pepys’s diary on which Magdalene College had sat for over a century. Smith did not know the system of shorthand the diarist had used, but he was a ...”

“... music (his characters have a particular taste for Mahler and for the Elizabethan composer John Dowland). In 1947 the awkward young man with literary ambitions moved into a flat with other young littérateurs, including the future avant-garde poets Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. He also took a job in a record store, where he met his first wife (they ...”

“... only in the South. The government sought to destroy King’s reputation. With the authorisation of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the FBI listened in on his phone calls with close associates and planted informers in his circle. Convinced the civil rights movement was a communist plot, J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men gathered recordings of his trysts with women ...”

“... gets locked accidentally in the detention room in his lycée for a night and finds a copy of Robinson Crusoe, a story he starts on then and later rereads over and over: ‘I wasn’t alone anymore! From that time on, there was a corner of my imagination that – in the prose of my life, full of beatings – was blue and a dream of poetry, and my heart ...”

“... coal mines. In the British view, India’s destiny was to remain what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson called in Why Nations Fail (2012) an ‘extractive colony’. The Raj was seen at its worst in the hardest times, responding to poor harvests and the resulting famines as reluctantly as the home government did in Ireland. The last large-scale famine in ...”

“... business of rewriting for the actors takes up a lot of time in America. I am still surprised that John Malkovich agreed to play Valmont without having it written in his contract that he didn’t have to die. It would have left him available for Dangerous Liaisons II. Diana Ross, on her way to Paris to make a ‘highly personal’ (auteuriste?) film about ...”

“... with angina. He was probably deterred from making this known by fear for his revered teacher, John Hunter, who was already suffering from the condition and was shortly to die of it. The irascible Hunter was said to have keeled over during an argument with a colleague. ‘My life is in the hands of any fool who cares to upset me,’ he had said awhile ...”

“... of beauty and genius. The autodidact poets discussed by Bridget Keegan – Ann Yearsley, Mary Robinson, Henry Headley and later John Clare – were all of one mind about this. Chatterton, they thought, had died by his own hand in poverty and despair, neglected by the metropolitan world. Michael Suarez’s account here ...”

“... as an author photograph of him in existence, and such information as there is is recycled from John Fowles’s fighting introduction to this, his only book.) For a time in the 1920s he promised to be a literary figure, ‘the next D.H. Lawrence’ and then Lawrence’s intended biographer, but life had other, dimmer plans for him. The Book of Ebenezer Le ...”

“... and fabrications of others, and had justified doubts about some of the work of one senior scholar, John Payne Collier. Halliwell was still only 20 when, in 1840, he joined three distinguished figures – Alexander Dyce, Charles Knight and Collier – in founding the Shakespeare Society. Collier was then around fifty, with another forty-odd years to live. He ...”