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“... and the boring meeting’, but Healey had, for forty years, spent taxing days drafting the former and weary evenings attending the latter. It was the struggle to which he had devoted himself: a struggle for the advancement of his own ideas, of his own party and, inevitably, of his own position as the means of achieving the rest. Readers of The Time of ...”

“... he was taking a trip with his wife she sent him an email containing a story that, she claimed, a former member of the creative writing class called Elaine had sent her about an American woman who seduces an Arab man. Nasreen believed, or said she believed, that the story was a veiled account of a real affair between Elaine and Lasdun: ‘In effect Nasreen ...”

“... allegations that [a prison teacher] Beverley Horne, 35, had sex sessions with Lester Jackson [a pupil inmate], who is serving a life sentence for beating an accountant to death with a baseball bat.’ And a few months ago the News of the World sent its ‘fake sheik’ to India to test the family values of the father of the nine-year-old girl who co-starred ...”

“... the following year. Christiaan died a rich man, having inherited a thousand guilders from his former master, a director-general of the slave fort Elmina. In the absence of an image of Christiaan, it’s tempting to let the marks of his pen make a portrait. His signature is a handsome one – clear and compact but spikily elegant. Its very presence on the ...”

“... in the law, to bridge those last hundred-odd years. The senior clerk in the chambers where I was a pupil in the 1960s had started work towards 1890 as a boy in the Temple, where he had been trained to write copperplate with the steel-nibbed pen that he would still use to copy out pleadings and opinions for signature when the typist was away. My head of ...”

“... make him look as good as possible,’ Hemingway wrote. So wide was the margin between master and pupil, both in musculature and in technique, that Hemingway could without difficulty refrain from doing his opponent any damage. Lewis, he felt sure, wanted to see Pound hurt. He was careful not to oblige. ‘I never countered but kept Ezra moving after me ...”

“... come in many forms that are often hard to spot ahead of one’s rivals. Nevertheless, Ikeda, a former financial bureaucrat, saw open frontiers beckoning to Japan from all points of the social and political compass when he announced his income-doubling scheme in 1960, by which year Japan had moved from the ravages of its own futile wars to the sunlit ...”

“... is, however, all too simple: it was the fault of Lawrence’s awful mother. Her claim to be a former teacher from a genteel background was a fraud: she tormented her bluff and genial working-class husband, and forced her children to hate him; she was rightly ostracised by her neighbours for her disdainful self-righteousness; she ‘cruelly ...”

“... which historians concerned with later periods could profitably follow – Mommsen’s most eminent pupil was Max Weber – Housman persevered in the 18th-century mode of confining himself to textual criticism. The masterly commentary that accompanies his edition of Manilius is wholly concentrated on the establishment of the text. Brink tells again the familiar ...”

“... tone), but powerful. Locke passed his intellectual curiosity about the powers of enthusiasm to his pupil, the young Anthony Ashley Cooper, who was to become 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury had Locke as his private tutor for the early years of his education and was to call him his ‘foster-father’. Locke had been at the right hand of his ...”

“... study medicine, but had been told that he’d be cut off if he did. Hegel eventually persuaded a former student of his in Brussels to enlist the boy in the Dutch Army. Ludwig went to the East Indies and there died, at 24, without his father ever hearing. He always wondered what the connection had been between ‘Mr Hegel’ and ‘my dear mother’. Ludwig ...”

“... her funeral he supposes Ruth, who also attends, to be the dead woman. Ruth now owns Mary’s former dwelling, and here she brings Bobbo on his eventual release from prison. Sometimes she lets him sleep with her and sometimes – but only for the pleasure of humiliating him – she sleeps with her manservant. It is a matter of power. ‘I have all, and he ...”

“... work called Colonial Elites and a masterly study of Tacitus, in two large volumes. The former work, dealing with Spain and the Americas as well as Rome, showed that Syme had not forgotten his New Zealand origins, which have been as useful to him as his experience in the Hampshire Militia was to Gibbon. In his Tacitus, Syme’s command over the ...”

“... historian of Henry VIII’s reign, A.F. Pollard, and the consequential advice of Pollard’s pupil, J.E. Neale, whom Pollard had decades earlier directed into the adjacent Elizabethan period. Some of the questions which presently emerged arose in the purest Eltonian fashion through reconstituting the archive in that original integrity which Victorian ...”

“... decide whether it is doing social history or doing ‘good art’ – the catalogue plumps for the former – and it doesn’t succeed in doing either, all of the time. But it can’t help being interesting. On their first visit to London – they both arrived in 1870, in September and December respectively, and were gone by mid-1871 – Monet, who lodged off ...”