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“... do his aesthete’s thing against nature. For Salisbury, there was Hatfield House. Hatfield was home, Hatfield was friendly chaos, Hatfield was where the private man was revealed. Hatfield was where the Hobbesian world, the world of warfare between the possessing and the non-possessing classes, ended. But Salisbury, a sensitive, nervous, scientifically ...”

“... rather unsavoury disciples – most prominently among them, the racist ‘philosopher’ Houston Stewart Chamberlain – and after that by Cosima’s English daughter-in-law, Winifred. Wagner proved for many Englishmen and women the perfect expression of the night-side of European life: the first of these strange disciples, Jessie Laussot, makes her ...”

“... evidence can be overcome by fervour, at least for a time. Medicine is different. It is the natural home of the untested hypothesis: acupuncture, homeopathy, osteopathy and chiropractice flourish. And it is a happy hunting ground for the enthusiast; health stories are hot news. So a heavy responsibility falls on those who publicly promulgate hypotheses whose ...”

“... could deplore patriotism (making an ironic exception only for her feelings for Yorkshire, her home county), and could happily spend college dinners discussing such questions as ‘Why do rich people always get so dull?’Neither Cambridge nor classics, however, retained her permanently. In 1922, she decamped to Paris, and even before that – from not ...”

“... won over by the theatrical life, and before he had reached school-leaving age, he ran away from home to join a troupe of acrobats in Norwich called Bob Pender’s Knockabout Comedians. When his father found him, he made him return to school, where Archie did his ‘unlevel best to flunk at everything’, as Grant later said. He got himself expelled, and ...”

“... she was fond of her own way and saw no reason not to have it in matters of state as well as at home. All in all the young queen had more in common with her unpopular and self-indulgent uncles George IV and William IV than the fresh-faced appearance and the famous promise to ‘be good’ suggested. Courtiers and Victoria herself recorded tearful scenes and ...”

“... Charles Reade led a strenuous campaign in the Daily Telegraph which successfully pushed the Home Secretary into remitting the sentence. Riots were feared in Liverpool after the conspicuously unsound conviction and death sentence passed on Florence Maybrick in 1889; but executions generally fed a public appetite. Twenty thousand people went to watch ...”

“... A more typical female role model of the conformist period was June Allyson, pouting loyally at home while James Stewart, camped out in the Mojave Desert, manfully concerned himself with the creation of the Strategic Air Command – a theme that took advantage of the B-36’s capacity to fill the Cinemascope screen. The ...”

“... leather-jacketed, blue-jeaned rock idol (the ‘love child of Bob Dylan and James Brown’, as Jon Stewart joked) that we could almost have fist-bumped. To get this close, we journos had to bring specific photo ID (‘driver’s licence or passport’), be searched, undertake to make notes only with pen and notepad, refrain from filming, recording or ...”

“... bought a new 78, enjoying the sound of big band and some American singers. One week she brought home a record by Elvis Presley. Her son already knew the name: the previous weekend in the local barber’s he had come across a photo of the ‘most bizarre-looking man I’d ever seen. Everything about him looked extraordinary: his clothes, his hair, even the ...”

“... populist, that ‘without any affectation’ Wilson ‘prefers the kind of unassuming, comfortable home life which he shares with millions of ordinary families’. It comes as no surprise to find that he proposed the ‘white heat of technology’ wheeze to Wilson as a campaign theme for 1964, though Crossman’s own ignorance of scientific matters was as ...”

“... and unemotional. To their colleagues they appeared strong, stern, shy and silent; they took work home at night and at weekends; they had time for few hobbies or recreations; they jealously guarded their private lives; but in the select company of those who knew them well, they were warm-hearted, charming, kindly and ...”

“... is mentioned on several occasions in the inventory as adorning the furnishings of Elisabetta’s home. However, Fortini Brown has discovered that Elisabetta’s brother’s legitimacy was questioned, and she includes an illustration showing the page of the Libro d’Oro, the Venetian register of nobility, on which his name is struck out. We may therefore ...”

“... as the floor, wall or ceiling of a hospital ward, it stops growing and starts to die. Its natural home is the front of the human nose, the part that is picked. Most of us have it there at some time in our lives. About 20 per cent of the population carry it throughout their lives, 60 per cent intermittently, and 20 per cent never. In some people it inhabits ...”

“... Room 40 in the Admiralty had laid the foundations of modern cryptography during World War One; Stewart Menzies, head of SIS (the model for James Bond’s M); Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Strong from Military Intelligence, who had, in 1940, warned the disbelieving French that Hitler would attack through the Ardennes, and who was later appropriated by ...”