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“... In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he interrogated an old man whose long life in the wake of the Reformation seemed to have left him entirely ignorant of all matters theological and ecclesiastical ...”

“... It took G.K. Chesterton to discover, in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, this lethal vignette of a World War One profiteer: The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I. In World War Two, the pot-bellied profiteers of the cartoonists shared a crowded roll of dishonour with a multitude of thieves, chisellers, racketeers and spivs, whose activities are mercilessly set out in An Underworld at War ...”

“... reform and improved urban welfare. The great change in the health of the urban population took place between 1880 and 1920. After that, improvement was slower but could still be directly brought about by legislation. The last vicious London smog took place, Bill Luckin’s chapter on pollution reminds us, after the ...”

“... France, to Switzerland, Italy, Germany and back again. Lee was eager to emphasise that her parents took no interest in monuments, panoramic views, churches or local colour. ‘We never saw any sights,’ she wrote in The Sentimental Traveller (1908): instead, she read voraciously, was casually instructed by a string of governesses and acquired an enduring love ...”

“... son to Stellenbosch University. There, he might have encountered nationalist ideas. As it was, he took a job with an anti-Afrikaner newspaper in the very British city of Durban and decided to become an English writer. Christened Lourens, he began to call himself Laurens, a name that he liked to pretend recalled Huguenot descent, but in some of the stories his ...”

“... door. After a year she gave notice – she wished to move on – but before giving up her job she took leave to nurse victims of the Broad Street Pump cholera outbreak in Soho. Between 31 August and 9 September, five hundred residents of the streets around Golden Square died. Once the outbreak was over she returned to her parents’ home in Derbyshire. Mrs ...”

“... philosopher Damascius, written in the sixth century; and a late seventh-century Chronicle by John, bishop of Nikiu, which survives in an Ethiopic translation of an Arabic translation of a Greek text based in part on Coptic oral tradition. Damascius, the only pagan source, offers the most detailed portrait of Hypatia. His Life of Isidore, a biography of ...”

“... Kentridge’s subject: the art-commissioning body for the World War One centenary gave the job to John Akomfrah, whose three-screen installation, Mimesis: African Soldier, is on show at the Imperial War Museum in London.Akomfrah, born in Ghana in 1957 and famous for his video/sound explorations of migration (mostly forced migrations, including slavery), the ...”

“... having sex together. When they went on holiday to the seaside town of Portobello the teachers took Jane Cumming with them: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods shared a bed; Miss Cumming slept in a bed at the foot of theirs. She claimed it was at Portobello that she had first been disturbed by whispering, kissing and ‘shaking the bed’ in the early mornings. She ...”

“... By God, America is great, and so are its scholarly books. This one is 572 pages long and it took the author twenty years to write. Longer than Katherine Anne Porter found to write the whole of her resplendent work. Joan Givner’s book might be called light plane reading, except that it is heartlessly grave, gravid though fruitless, and would take the most receptive astronauts a moon-flight to try to sleep through, its dulled prose keeping them tossing and turning all the way ...”

“... actress Simone Benda, who pulled every string, in vain, to get him the Prix Goncourt. He took to racing cars and flying – ‘like Peter Pan’, he told Francis Jammes. Le Grand Meaulnes was written, for the most part, in Rue Cassini. If he had survived the war, what would he have written? Not, probably, Colombe Blanchet, which he had begun, but, as ...”

“... wretchedly unsure of herself – she once felt like throwing it in the farm dam – but when she took the book to London soon afterwards, it had a wide success and the young author was swept up in freethinking, socialist and Utopian circles. The real attraction and challenge of Olive Schreiner for her many biographers is to take hold of a multi-sided career ...”

“... may be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... should fairly be credited with more successes than failures, even at the time when millions took to the streets to denounce him. Right up to the end of February, he seemed to have the better of the argument. Who would have thought that Iraq’s benighted regime would submit to this degree of containment by a peaceful UN process, backed by the credible ...”

“... reverberations from those events reached a long way: as far as the Cold War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy (maybe), Watergate and, every four years to this day, the American presidential election. It is a story that reminds us of the bond – political, cultural, economic, sentimental – between the United States and Cuba, a bond that tightened in the ...”