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“... settles down instead into a rake’s progress, grippingly told. The asthmatic and charismatic Joseph Dudgeon Fellows progresses from sexual bounder to property tycoon and young meteor in the moral murk of Wilson’s last administration. He is ruined, and flees his creditors to Ireland, where – now an invalid – he has some farcical brushes with the IRA ...”

“... not so much among the moors and winds and harebells as in the kitchen and scullery with Nellie and Joseph. As a novel it contains no hint of interest in human individuality or psychology, which was no doubt why Ivy Compton-Burnett pronounced it powerful but hollow, a masterpiece both striking and meaningless. Emily, then, was much less wholeheartedly in her ...”

“... the top 20 per cent of the ability range, CSEs for the next 40 per cent. Whatever faults Sir Keith Joseph had, it must be conceded that he is the only Secretary of State at the DES to have said, and kept on saying, that the exam-oriented school curriculum has grossly neglected the 40 per cent of schoolchildren who are written off as ‘of low ability’. This ...”

“... Thirty years on, HMS Pinafore is still afloat. Refitted and relaunched by directors like Joseph Papp, Jonathan Miller, Ken Russell and Mark Savage as post-copyright, post-D’Oyly Carte G&S, not only Pinafore, but The Pirates of Penzance, The Mikado and Princess Ida too have been successfully revived on both sides of the Atlantic. Showbusiness ...”

“... my heart and my judgment are equally satisfied with the man of my choice.’ The chosen one was John Austin, son of an Ipswich corn merchant of similar wealth and dissenting beliefs to the Taylors. Though John was only three years older than Sarah, his prematurely white hair and grave demeanour made him a surprising ...”

“... representing the interests of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor, Joseph Cotten and many lesser lights in the studio firmament. Those of us who knew Clancy – he died in July 2017 in Los Angeles at the age of ninety – can attest that he was a tummler of note, a real-life Zelig who found himself with astonishing frequency at ...”

“... wreck of the East-Indiaman Abergavenny arose primarily from the circumstance that its captain was John Wordsworth, brother of the more famous William and Dorothy. His death in 1805 at the outset of what was to have been his last voyage before he retired (at 34) caused convulsions of sorrow at Grasmere, where he had intended to join the family circle. The ...”

“... was not conventionally handsome.’ The crayon sketch of Connolly on the jacket, by Augustus John, is no oil painting. But what might make us reluctant to spring to Connolly’s defence is that he said the same sort of thing about others, while characteristically mingling it with self-disgust: ‘Back in London met Princess Bibesco and did not care for ...”

“... hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope ...”

“... The title of Frances FitzGerald’s new book comes from the sermon John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, delivered on board the Arabella shortly before landing in the New World in 1630. Fully conscious of the exemplary character of their enterprise, he urged his companions to walk humbly in the ways of God by remaining true to the Puritan tenets of a faith they could no longer practise in England ...”

“... school, but was determined to support herself by writing. In this she was helped by the publisher Joseph Johnson, whose three o’clock salons – known as ‘a Menagerie of Live Authors’ – introduced her to the work of Thomas Paine, William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and Joseph Priestley. Johnson taught her to ...”

“... that J.G.A. Pocock told him that Conrad Russell told him that Bertrand Russell told him that Lord John Russell told him that his father the sixth Duke of Bedford told him that he had heard William Pitt the Younger speak in Parliament during the Napoleonic Wars, and that Pitt had this curious way of talking, a particular mannerism that the sixth Duke of ...”

“... to carry important meaning in Doctorow’s narratives; in Loon Lake the vagrant hero was given Joseph Conrad’s Polish name; in the more autobiographical World’s Fair the author’s own name was used. Here the hero-narrator is called Billy Bathgate. The allusion is not to the unlovely Scottish mining town but to Bathgate Avenue in Doctorow’s native ...”

“... didn’t. The building was rejected by the planning inspector, but the rejection was overruled by John Prescott, then ‘first secretary of state’, on the basis that it was part of an existing ‘cluster’ of tall buildings. That wasn’t true, but the relevant authorities set about making it true in retrospect, by giving planning permission to a number of ...”

“... with the ‘time of old sin’ – whether a fantastical Alma-Tadema-ish Ancient Rome, or a John Addington Symonds Athens, where pederasty was not merely permissible but praiseworthy – drifted, for those who survived their heady youth of Baudelaire and absinthe, into the Aesthetes’ religion, in which chalices and smoke played their part. ...”