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“... Yes, he’s madly upper crust. In the minority were those impressed, such as Stephen Spender and William Plomer. Betjeman wrote to the latter thanking him. ‘Fuck Wain and the prig in the Times who was probably Griggers’ – Geoffrey Grigson, another in his rogues’ gallery. ‘I’ve gone away to escape further blows.’ His publisher hoped to steer ...”

“... Brown permission to level her mother-in-law’s follies. The Dowager Princess then employed William Chambers to build her own: a remarkable range of buildings, including a mosque, a gothic cathedral, an alhambra and the Pagoda, which is the finest survival of these follies. The third Earl of Bute, more distinguished as a natural historian than as a ...”

“... Simon Shorvoan’s essay in the catalogue describing their lives in England is a vignette of Bedford Park bohemia, of dedication to an artistic life in which poverty was an accepted condition. The dilapidated 18th-century cottage, The Brook, which Lucien and Esther moved into in 1901, was over the years transformed into what Tyrone Guthrie called ‘the ...”

“... William De Morgan’s Life, death and reputation form a curious episode in the history of taste. He died, in 1917, a famous Edwardian novelist, and was almost forgotten. Nearly half a century later he was rediscovered as a great Victorian ceramist. Appropriately, the technique in which he excelled as a potter, lustre, is one that has itself been several times lost, rediscovered and discarded again by different civilisations ...”

“... my father.This passage is very close indeed to the translation in the Matthew Bible of 1537 (by William Tyndale) and there are just two differences from the King James Bible of 1611 (‘evil occurrent’ in place of ‘any evil plague’; ‘purpose’ for ‘am determined’). But this version is from the Great Bible of 1539-40, ‘the Bible appointed to ...”

“... evil and intelligent buncha bastards and shits in America’. The group included Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lucien Carr and David Kammerer. In August 1944, Carr stabbed and killed Kammerer. Near the end of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, a lightly fictionalised and surprisingly engaging account of the murder and of the months leading up to ...”

“... the Fen country onwards from the 17th century, when Cornelius Vermuyden and his Dutchmen cut the Bedford River, diverted the Ouse, and built the Denver and Hermitage Sluices: ‘They dug subsidiary cuts, drains, lodes, dykes, eaus and ditches and converted 95,000 acres into summer, if not winter, grazing. Practical and forward-looking people, the Dutch. And ...”

“... intervals, the volumes plopped from the press, 63 in all, from Jacques Abbadie in 1885 to William Zuylestein in 1900, containing some thirty thousand pages on which 650 contributors recorded the details of 30,000 lives. And, as with the painting of the Forth Bridge, once this great Victorian monument was completed it was time to start all over ...”

“... Their friends included the ageing Radical John Bright and Elizabeth Gaskell’s widower, William. But smart society was closed to them and this was something that Beatrix’s mother, Helen, seems to have minded deeply. A grim-faced little woman, she apparently occupied herself entirely with a round of calls and with ordering and re-ordering her ...”

“... up to a few years ago. The Parish Survey records in 1722 the ‘Messuage in Cranfield built by Dr William Aspin, with the moat round it and groves of trees adjoining’. There is no clear explanation for the existence or indeed the survival of these moats, since no other local parishes appear to have them. Moat farm was still completely encircled with water ...”

“... and the sound of the curlew’s song’. What he finds is a murky Irish town that is ‘like Bedford, or Batley, or Basildon in Essex’: ‘It’s a place that is good of its kind, but that no one would want to visit and that sensitive teenagers long to leave, or at least to write graffiti on.’ Its heyday has passed, the old buildings replaced by a ...”

“... plays with Edwin Björkman. Does Shaw dine with his neighbour George Wardle, manager of William Morris’s Merton works, in April 1887? Weintraub reminds us that Mrs Wardle, 26 years earlier, was acquitted in a sensational trial of the charge of murdering her lover. As Shaw grows more cavalier about keeping up the entries, Weintraub grows more ...”

“... book trade would like to see taking place each year in Britain. A start has perhaps been made. The Bedford Square Book Bang was an early, local precedent; the Barnsley Book Bonanza, a week-long festival which started last year, is closer to the Hungarian model, with market-stalls, lectures, poetry ’n’ pints, signing sessions, lectures and seminars bringing ...”

“... from himself) was born of mean Parentage in Devonshire, and had Francis Russel (afterwards Earl of Bedford) for his Godfather, who, according to Custome, gave him his christen name. Whilest he was yet a Child, his Father, imbracing the Protestant Doctrine, was called in question by the Law of the Six Articles, made by King Henry the Eighth against the ...”

“... for Useful Knowledge – which, stunningly, had Benjamin Franklin, the Sanskrit scholar Sir William Jones and the agriculturalist Arthur Young among its corresponding members – that one-horse Kentish town boasted a humane society, assorted drinking and dining clubs, an agricultural society, concert and music societies, trapball and card societies, a ...”