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“... was 16, in 1855, his father lowered him daily down a well shaft on their new farm at Hickory Hill. John cut with chisel and hammer through fine-grained sandstone until he struck ‘a fine, hearty gush of water’. By then he had dinted his way through eighty feet of rock, working alone from dawn till dark. When he was overcome with choke-damp at the ...”

“... in poverty. In 2007 I reported on the shooting of 14-year-old Bernard Simon in the city’s Cherry Hill neighbourhood. It reminded me of a South African township, completely segregated and poor, with just a few ways in and out. ‘If you’re in Cherry Hill, then chances are it’s your destination,’ Cathy ...”

“... in an afternoon pub, beside a street market that seemed to have migrated across town from Notting Hill, close to a stretch of the Regent’s Canal that had been peremptorily closed, fenced, drained. Instead of dogs, perhaps they were going to kill unsightly eels and fish, or the birds that feed on them. No work was in progress, but the exclusion zone had been ...”

“... and Kegan Paul published The Victorian City: Images and Realities, edited by H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff, a Wagnerian epic in which history went to town in exuberant, zestful and flamboyant fashion. Understandably, the two volumes won immediate and widespread acclaim as a tour de force of entrepreneurial inspiration and editorial skill: ‘a study in ...”

“... is no coincidence that the best political styles belong to Enoch Powell, Anthony Wedgwood-Benn and Michael Foot, all men ‘committed to working on and defending the idea of the United Kingdom’. As it happens, Mr Powell himself contributes a piece on ‘The Language of Politics’, in which he concludes that although speeches are briefer and politicians a ...”

“... was at that time the largest secular building in the city, built in the Gothic style on a little hill that Antwerpers called Blood Mountain. There, the butchers processed their fresh meat beneath elegant tapestries. They feasted in the Vleeshuis, sitting on fine Spanish leather chairs embossed with the figure of their patron, St John, accompanied by his ...”

“... and we have forgotten the actual matter of the dispute. Now, however, we can relive the tale, for Michael Taggart has been back to the archives of West Yorkshire and the House of Lords to find the local and personal details, as well as the state of the law at the time of litigation. His readable book also sets the problem in the wider contexts of public ...”

“... who made the untried concept of the lavishly glazed building actually work; it was the young Michael Wilford, newly arrived in the office as the first full-time assistant, who provided last-minute design details for the contractors. (Sitting between Stirling and Gowan, Wilford found himself in the creative crossfire between the two highly opinionated ...”

“... by Thomas Pakenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where ‘our side’, the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say ‘facts’) about the Rising: how the English had muskets whereas we just had pikes, how the English poured boiling tar on the scalps ...”

“... of its pungency: The potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move Along the side-fall of the hill ... Austin Clarke was moving on from the kind of social criticism, lyrically expressed, which we get in ‘The Straying Student’, to a knottier and more derisive manifestation of the same drive (though it took him 17 years to get together a volume of ...”

“... the slashing of a wrist and his lonely, ambiguous death at the edge of a road near Chapel Hill in North Carolina, at the age of 51. Children abound in Jarrell’s poetry. ‘90 North’, one of his earliest successful poems, opens with a child imagining a heroic voyage to the North Pole, then cuts to the adult, actually at the North ...”

“... was a tape-recorded conversation between Hamilton and the First Secretary to the Treasury, Michael Heseltine, in which Hamilton denied any ‘financial relationship’ with Ian Greer. Greer knew he had paid, and realised his fellow plaintive would be exposed in court as a liar. He told Hamilton he wanted to fight the case separately, with a new set of ...”

“... records the birthdays of various contemporary literary figures. Here is Dennis Potter on 17 May, Michael Frayn on 8 September, Edna O’Brien on 15 December, and so naturally I turn to my own birthday. May 9 is blank except for the note: ‘The first British self-service launderette is opened on Queensway, London 1949.’4 January. George F. tells me that ...”

“... for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through Dumfriesshire, Northumberland or Sussex. Later I would ...”

“... There is a fine, cautious, detailed review of volumes of verse by Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill; there are notes on Ford Madox Ford, Saint-John Perse and many others. And above all there is a beautiful, puzzled essay on Cavafy in which Auden, who firmly believes you need to know his or her language, and perhaps even be a native speaker, to read a poet ...”