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“... the museum after its redesign by the Japanese architect Yoshio Taniguchi. In the New Yorker John Updike likened its presence to ‘an invisible cathedral’, but it is closer to an abstract palace. The main access is now nearer Sixth than Fifth Avenue, and you enter from either 53rd or 54th Street into a lobby, paced with white columns, that cuts all ...”

“... a fictional symposium that ran in the paper between 1822 and 1835. The author of the Noctes was John Wilson, who constructed dialogues between his own alter ego (‘Christopher North’) and that of Hogg (‘the Shepherd’). The Shepherd gets the best lines – better, some have suggested, than anything Hogg ever wrote – but he is also made to look a ...”

“... with an ANC-ruled South Africa, back within the Commonwealth. If the book has a hero it is Sir John Maud, the British high commissioner who advised in 1960 that since a black government must come to power one day, Britain must ‘keep faith’ with the black majority, while at the same time not antagonising the National Party government to no good ...”

“... to fill in the details of his life, written with affection, humour and perspicacity by the pianist John Tilbury. Tilbury was Cardew’s friend and colleague, and a one-time (and part-time) fellow-traveller on the Maoist road; he has spent a quarter of a century writing this book. Aficionados will love his account; others might have preferred a more succinct ...”

“... disloyalty, ambition, greed, insecurity and all the British hypocrisies that he crashed into. John Preston has made the most of it, providing not only a very readable and amusing book but also the fullest account yet of what actually happened. Some of his sourcing could be clearer – there are rather vague appendices and no footnotes – but he is ...”

“... on the part of mothers of the necessary conditions of bringing up healthy children’, as Major General Sir Frederick Maurice put it. Declining birth rates, rising infant mortality and anxieties about securing the empire focused government attention on the new ‘science’ of mothercraft.The early decades of the 20th century saw the rise of a culture ...”

“... US and Britain cope with mass death and the destruction of livelihoods. Covid-19 shattered what John Stuart Mill called ‘the deep slumber of a decided opinion’, forcing many to realise that they live in a broken society, with a carefully dismantled state. As the Süddeutsche Zeitung put it in May, unequal and unhealthy societies are ‘a good breeding ...”

“... in Washington DC into a hotel. He had been chosen by the government over the owners of Hyatt, major donors to Obama, because of his superior negotiating skills. If he had a flaw, his father used to tell him, it was that he was too tough: ‘Be a little like Jeb Bush once in a while, soft.’ I’ve watched many of Trump’s speeches, all of which seem to ...”

“... left – does. Jeremy Corbyn is out of the party and won as an independent at the last election; John McDonnell had the whip suspended in July for voting against the new Labour government to scrap the two-child limit for Universal Credit or child tax credits; Ken Livingstone has Alzheimer’s. Their shared mentor, Tony Benn, is long dead. Beckett is an ...”

“... ship was put back on an even keel. Curiously, although the Grosart debacle, fully documented in John Bicknell’s edition of Stephen’s letters, is briefly mentioned in Alan Bell’s exemplary entry on Stephen in the ODNB, these misdemeanours make no appearance in Arthur Sherbo’s entry on Grosart. Thereafter, the DNB maintained its announced schedule ...”

“... a gambler. A professional gambler until his death at 27. Poker. High-low was his action. He was a major leaguer in that line and regrettably there’s a formidable attrition rate as regards high stakes and its lifestyle equivalent. But it was high stakes from the start with my brother: 48 or 72-hour marathons with thousands of dollars changing hands; all ...”

“... Berlin’s most memorable essays deal with writers like Sorel or Tolstoy, rather than with the major political philosophers of the modern period. The sympathy they reveal for the informal and undoctrinal is one of the attractive features of his work – but it has its costs. Where there are elements in a particular corpus of ideas which for one reason or ...”

“... dimly lit pre-takeoff mode. Travelling on a south-eastern trajectory, through halts symbolising major culture shifts – Canary Wharf, Custom House, Woolwich – we time-travelled through remembered eras of colonisation, industry and investment. We were unravelling the Knowles thesis, the assertion that money moved in from the East, like the foul winds of ...”

“... During the same period, Armstrong recorded 235 numbers for Decca, the most commercial of the major labels. Decca never ran out of ideas, many of them poor, for variously teaming their contracted artists – e.g., Armstrong’s ludicrous 1936-37 recordings with two clunky Hawaiian groups, The Polynesians and Andy Iona and His Islanders, part of a ...”

“... precedence. To undertake a new full-scale biography of William Shakespeare, then, or to suggest a major alteration to our understanding of the playwright’s early life, is to walk directly onto holy ground: in setting out to produce Shakespeare: A Life and Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, Park Honan and E.A.J. Honigmann have taken on tasks which are about ...”