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“... Loach, who joined the BBC as a trainee director in 1963, and Tony Garnett, who had been hired by James MacTaggart, producer of the Wednesday Play series, as a story editor and talent scout. Taking advantage of MacTaggart being on holiday, Garnett put sufficient resources into the project to ensure that it would be too expensive to cancel by the time he got ...”

“... by armed cavalry resulting in 15 deaths and over 600 injuries.’ A stone memorial designed by the Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller has been commissioned as part of an extensive programme of lottery-funded commemorations to mark next year’s bicentenary. Questions remain about the build-up to 16 August and who was at fault that day. Donald Read’s ...”

“... found everywhere in American writing, from Cooper to Emerson, from Twain to Whitman, and Henry James, from Dreiser to Willa Cather and on to Mailer. Lawrence’s two Englishwomen, Lou Witt and her acerbic mother, are to be found at the end of the story in the deserts of New Mexico, where the younger woman, like the New England woman who occupied the ranch ...”

“... Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not repeat itself, is there any reason why royal biography ...”

“... convex mirror, such as is used by barbers ... He accordingly caused a ball of wood to be made By a turner, and having divided it in half and Brought it to the size of the mirror, he set himself With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass.’ The implications of this, for space and time, absorbed Ashbery; and he spent hundreds of delicate lines ...”

“... respect rather than disposable celebrity. She has contributed to some of the better documentaries: James Ellroy, Anita Ekberg, Eric Sykes, watershed BBC2, air-hostesses and desert roads, midnight fodder on Channel 4, the real lost memories. She likes to use old film, degraded archive footage, and to have it reshot on tape, fed into her slim box of ...”

“... According to Oscar Wilde, before Dickens there were no fogs, and before Turner no sunsets. Wilde is merely exaggerating a truth, practising the art of aphorism, drawing our attention to this precept: we need art so that we can see what we are seeing. On his way to the Hebrides, Dr Johnson pulled down the blind on what a future generation of writers would take for their subject-matter – wild, ‘romantic’ nature ...”

“... Melba in a Paris street and asked her for money, she gave him what she had in her purse. But Henry James’s friend Morton Fullerton made a more typical response – he must have written this letter with Shakespeare’s play open on his desk: I am distressed to have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the patrie of ...”

“... does not work, partly because her sabbatical coincides with that of a younger colleague, Fred Turner. Fred happens to be married to Zimmern’s daughter Roo; his trip to London to research into John Gay starts badly because he and Roo have quarrelled, and he has had to come to London without her. Arriving in damp mid-winter, he at first has to rely on the ...”

“... on me, I set to work. When Hanson left Birmingham, Tara Prem inherited the project. She and Pedr James, the script editor, made numerous suggestions for improvement and the play’s final shape owes a lot to them. My intention was to take a television cliché – a kind of family reunion, a dinner party – and to transform it by degrees and by logical ...”

“... the end not only of Haydon’s career, but of painting in ‘the tradition of Joshua Reynolds, James Barry and Benjamin West’. How convincing this argument is depends on how we view that ‘tradition’. Of the three artists only West, who found a royal patron with the necessary deep pockets and high ceilings, made a career as a history painter. Reynolds ...”

“... theatre in which tier on tier of streets look out across the estuary to the mountains. Not only James Watt, but many painters, novelists and poets began here. After utter collapse, small citizens’ groups are trying to rub the old town back to life, to restore hope: a new theatre, the restoration of the huge ropeworks factory, a protest (why use cobbles ...”

“... rework – had the dubious merit of having once painted stormy waves over a calm harbour scene by Turner. Ned did well enough at school to be allowed to study classics, and his classmates became his first real friends. He was attracted to religious ceremony, and arrived at Oxford in 1853 a fervent Tractarian: he dreamed of following in the footsteps of John ...”

“... was brought up by his paternal grandparents, while Crippen ‘turned his sights east’. Cora Turner, born Kunegunde Mackamotzki, and later to restyle herself as Belle Elmore, was the daughter of a hard-up German immigrant family in Brooklyn. She had an (illegal) abortion, aged eighteen, after her domestic employer got her pregnant. Dr George Clinton ...”

“... Reed. The Beats were now heritage fodder, a potential Bloomsbury group. There was even talk of James Ivory optioning a Neal Cassady property. I wondered, thinking of Blake’s formative experiences there, whether Carolyn had caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring ...”