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“... These include local Labour and Tory MPs. One man, however, makes no protest: the paid informer David Bertlestein, source of several scandalous allegations against Stalker, who died of a heart attack in Preston prison in March 1985. Asked after his reinstatement about the strange circumstances surrounding his case, John Stalker is understandably ...”

“... The Western Canon, as though its author – and its editor, since the book has been assembled by David Mikics from pieces written over the past half-century – was provoked by the reaction to his earlier book into seeing a wider world of writing. There are chapters on black authors (Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Robert ...”

“... before men had a word for it. How indeed could they have a word for it until it had happened? David Underdown, one of the five big names contributing to this festschrift, has a characteristically wise survey of ‘Community and Class’ in the English Revolution. Disregarding Hexter’s prohibitions, he concludes: ‘The Marxist model of local political ...”

“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... refuser (1853). Perhaps the two portrayals are not coincidental. In 1851, the Melville family read David Copperfield aloud as their evening entertainment. The pre-20th-century office worker saw himself as a cut above the unsalaried labouring masses, and was as ambivalent about his superiors, who were his only means of rising, as the rest of the working world ...”

“... to know how much they earned in any single year, but Fielding’s successor, Sir Sampson Wright, reckoned that they pulled in ‘a very comfortable Livelihood with Reputation to themselves and Benefit to the Public’. They certainly developed an impressive reputation. By the late 1760s they were well known by name to the public through newspaper ...”

“... most of it), which should be seen as cautionary rather than exemplary. Andrew is critical of Sir David Petrie, ‘one of the service’s most successful DGs’ (at the time of the Double-Cross System during the war), for claiming that ‘too much of a past that is now remote can help but little with useful lessons,’ but Petrie may have been right in this ...”

“... Jesse Thornton for ‘addressing a white police officer without the title “mister”’; Malcom Wright for ‘yielding too little of the roadway to a white man as he passed in his wagon’. Anthony Crawford rejected a ‘white merchant’s bid for cottonseed’. Mary Turner was ‘lynched with her unborn child [it was cut from her belly and murdered] for ...”

“... We learn a great deal about his visual passions, for the 17th-century Dutch painters, for Caspar David Friedrich (Two Men Contemplating the Moon was part of the inspiration for Waiting for Godot) and, supremely, Cézanne (a late self-portrait attracted the quintessentially Beckettian description ‘overwhelmingly sad. A blind broken old man’). Cronin, on ...”

“... of opiate painkillers is perhaps the most ridiculous of them all. In 1989, a doctor named David Haddox developed a theory about opiates he called ‘pseudoaddiction’. The theory, which according to McGreal was based on the observation of a single cancer patient, said that if a patient was showing signs of tolerance and craving larger doses of an ...”

“... would be as different as land and sky. That evening, safe in his Bel Air rental (a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house previously owned by the shah of Iran), he said to Geller: ‘I don’t want to perform any more. I want to leave the world. Find me a monastery. I want to become a monk.’ But his ascetic mood soon passed (as every Elvis mood passed, each ...”

“... year to year in Exeter. I knew of his austere reputation and of his reluctance to publish from David Marquand, who was at Magdalen and who told me how he had been scared out of his wits one dark night in the cloisters when Bruce had swept past him in his Spanish cloak. I must have written to him and been told to come down to Magdalen, though I remember ...”

“... subsidy. The company trying to raise money for the Metropolitan was on the verge of collapse. David Wire, the lord mayor, allowed himself to be persuaded by Pearson – then the Corporation of the City of London’s solicitor – of the case for public transport in the capital, the one that’s still being made today. Wire accepted that something needed ...”

“... as Labour got into power. Both are barbarous and indefensible, except if you’re Clarissa Dickson Wright, who presumably feels her casserole threatened. But what a feast of humbug it is in every department. ‘We do what we like. We always have and always will. That’s democracy.’ 20 September. I am having my lunch outside the front door (salad of ...”

“... well known fact that giving absinthe to a dog would cause it to have an epileptic seizure. Joseph Wright of Derby’s terrifying painting of a bird being asphyxiated in a bell jar by the members of a provincial scientific society depicts an ‘experiment’ repeated more than a century after the importance of air for respiration had been confirmed with a ...”