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“... more serious business of having fun. Often, on encountering Mew’s children, I’m reminded of Elizabeth Bishop’s affection for a short story she came across in the New York Times, composed by an eight-year-old: ‘I told my little brother when you die you cannot breathe and he did not say a word. He just kept on playing.’The deaths of Mew’s little ...”

“... a bunch of proto-Brexiteers – Kwasi Kwarteng, Priti Patel, Dominic Raab, Chris Skidmore and Elizabeth Truss – slapdashed a manifesto together called Britannia Unchained, the gist of which is that the British have become squalid, lazy gits, getting fat and studying useless subjects like psychology and desiring only to be footballers or pop stars. If we ...”

“... chewing-gum dispenser) than from the work of his predecessors in art. As it happened, his sister Elizabeth was thought to be the artistic member of the family. She was sent to take painting classes with Edward Hopper, the son of the man who owned the local dry goods store. Joseph preferred to stay at home, immersed in Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers ...”

“... rural leaders, deliver services and win respect. The quality of journalists in Iraq has been high: Elizabeth Rubin for the New York Times Magazine and the New Republic, George Packer for the New Yorker, Rory McCarthy for the Guardian and James Astill for the Economist have produced great pieces. But even the most energetic analysts cannot move ...”

“... states to exclude women with no penalty at all. ‘If that word “male” be inserted,’ Elizabeth Cady Stanton warned, ‘it will take us a century at least to get it out.’These days, the Fourteenth Amendment tends to be unequivocally celebrated, with little or no awareness of its compromises. When it was drawn up, however, some reformers ...”

“... tried to coax informal revelations out of Roosevelt over lunch. He flirted with Ginger Rogers and Elizabeth Arden. He wrote The Gremlins (1943), about a pilot, for Walt Disney, but the film was never made. He slept with starlets – and then, in 1953, he married one. Patricia Neal, co-star with Ronald Reagan in The Hasty Heart and former lover of Gary ...”

“... Jonathan Meades (‘Robin behaved badly before anyone else did’), Ian Penman, John Williams, Elizabeth Young – they’ve all done him. And been stretchered back to the cab. A Cook tribute is the contemporary equivalent to the apprentice’s passing-out ceremony. In both cases, you’re likely to end up legless in a Clerkenwell dustbin. The great ...”

“... Harold Nicolson’s delightful vignettes Some People, Lytton Strachey’s psychological melodrama Elizabeth and Essex and A.J.A. Symons’s detective mystery. The Quest for Corvo – all designed to find more imaginative and adventurous ways of writing non-fiction. What these authors were trying to do was to release biography from the mechanical processes of ...”

“... the inauguration of the Iritty Bridge in Kerala in 1933. Even at that late date, there isn’t a brown face to be seen among the triumphant engineers in their trilbies and topis and the ladies in their long frocks. These magnificent feats were a fine way of maintaining full employment in Glasgow, Newcastle and Preston, not so hot for Bombay and ...”

“... that sort of tan & wrinkles. Like a reptile – though not squamous, not unpleasant. Lively brown eyes.’ Henry Williamson, whom Hughes admired, he describes in a letter to his brother, Gerald, saying he made a mess of his life ‘with Hitlerism’, but has an amazing knowledge of wildlife, ‘though he is a bit of an old sod.’He is more critical of ...”

“... the marginal social acceptability of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle, whose hand, ‘holding the teacup, was very brown, and very, very wrinkly with the soap-suds; and all through her gown and her cap there were hairpins sticking wrong end out; so that Lucie didn’t like to sit too near her.’ Both these essays show off Davenport’s range and gusto, his feats of ...”

“... from immune to the romance of Irish insurrection. When Maxwell suggested she read the Anglo-Irish Elizabeth Bowen, Brennan took back, without a word, a favourite portrait of Colette that she had hung behind his desk. Later, visiting London, she was ‘outraged’ to find that the only available map of the city was ‘the one with the “Bastion of ...”

“... the same grey lagoon with industry on the horizon, the same sparsely inhabited islands of cold brown grass with channels in between and, once you’re out, the same thrill to be had in both places from the first glimpse of the towers of the city. It’s always said that one should arrive in Venice by boat which, if you come by air, you generally do. But I ...”

“... washing sharing the basement, a desolate and grilling public garden, and the sea full of floating brown pennies of oil. This short passage shows a spontaneous poetic flair rarely equalled in Forster’s fiction, or elsewhere in the diaries: ‘those trudging squares and triangles’, both exact and subjective, the complex social irony of the ‘natives ...”

“... in the Countie of Lancaster (1613), illustrates the importance attached to unforced confessions: Elizabeth Device ‘made a very liberall and voluntarie Confession, as hereafter shall be given in evidence against her, upon her Arraignment and Triall’; and passing sentence, Justice Bromley said: ‘very few or none of you, but stand convicted upon your own ...”