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“... heard a woman outside Liberty’s saying to her husband: ‘Remind me to tell Austin that there is no main verb in that sentence.’15 January, Yorkshire. Trying to put my forty-year-old letters in order, I come across a diary for 1956-59. It’s depressing to read as very little of it is factual and most of it to do with my slightly sickening obsession ...”

“... had a phrase about the ‘great heart of Beethoven’, the rider to which was that it would make no sense to talk about the ‘great heart’ of Shakespeare. So much the worse for Beethoven, might be the sentiment of a non-philosopher who did not share Wittgenstein’s passion for music. But his point has its ramifications. Like Tolstoy, whose didactic tales ...”

“... show up, and my opposite number turned out to be Kim Dae Jung of South Korea, an admirable figure no doubt, but not the man who did more single-handedly to save the world from the danger of nuclear war than anyone. And who, single-handed, ensured that the transition in the USSR and the Soviet empire did not end in a bloodbath, as it did in Yugoslavia. This ...”

“... had been harassed and hounded for having her photo taken beside one of their posters. ‘Oh no, please, no, no, not today,’ a man was shouting. I think he really was upset.On I went to another fringe event, this one organised by Labour & Palestine, a grouping of trade ...”

“... differences between them, however, are quite minor because everyone seems to agree that there is no fundamental alternative to globalisation. And it is because of this absence of an alternative that refusal or reluctance to adapt on the part of national or local leaderships can look like stupidity or cowardice to outsiders like myself – reporters from rich ...”

“... grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so ...”

“... No one ever failed more completely to be the hero of his own life than the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, for whom heroism was an obsession. He used his own head as a model for Christ, Solomon, Alexander and Marcus Curtius and believed that heroic history painting was the highest form of art. Today his only generally remembered work is a portrait of Wordsworth ...”

“... realised that things had gone wrong as soon as I arrived at my hotel. The receptionists spoke no English. Only when I showed them my passport did they seem to accept, with reluctance, that I had a booking. I was given a key and took my own bag upstairs. The room was a cramped, overfurnished space with thin brown walls. On the desk was an envelope of ...”

“... architecture. It was completed after his death (in 1852) by another architectural historian, John Henry Parker, who also drew on it for Our English Home: Its Early History and Progress (1860). Despite this encouraging start, the emergence in the later 19th and early 20th centuries of modern history as a university subject did nothing to advance the study ...”

“... a very good appearance in the first circles, and drove about town in very knowing gigs. But I had no inclination for the law … As for the navy, it had fashion on its side, but I was too old when the subject was first started to enter it.Ferrars has no obligation to pick any of them. As the eldest son of a gentleman, he ...”

“... What are yow​ worthe in goodes if all your debtes were payd?’ John Tanner was asked in 1620 when he appeared as a witness at the church court in Chichester. ‘Twenty shillings,’ he answered. He had been called by one Robert Constable to support a case for defamation against Stephen Pentecost. Pentecost’s witnesses said Tanner couldn’t be trusted: he was ‘a poore needy fellow’ with ‘a little cottage of his owne to dwell in … and noe other meanes to live ...”

“... darkest period of his mourning. The volume includes letters to Joseph Priestley, Thomas Lawrence, John Thelwall, Samuel Parr (‘the Whig Dr Johnson’), the great liberal advocate Thomas Erskine, R.B. Sheridan, Charles James Fox, the novelists and dramatists Elizabeth Inchbald, Thomas Holcroft, Amelia Alderson, Mary Hays and Charlotte Smith, as well as ...”

“... it seems that everyone was in some sort of a hurry, though, as Fender makes clear, they were by no means only after the loot – many of them were just, well, ‘rushing’). But the West is also America itself, and ‘plotting’ is much more than charting the best route from Salt Lake City to Sacramento. Let Fender make the crucial point: ‘The problem ...”

“... and the coterie of Oxford women who had been instrumental in founding Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall must have given suffragists pause. For a time, then, and as Bush implies, the suffrage battle was less a ‘sex war’ than an argument among women – and one that did not divide neatly along progressive v. reactionary lines. Busy running settlement houses ...”

“... a little longer by staying on, as I thought vaguely ‘to do research’, though into what I had no idea. In quest of a supervisor and also a subject I paid a disastrous visit to Beryl Smalley at St Hilda’s, thinking I might do something on the Franciscans. There had been a torrential thunderstorm and forgetting to wipe my feet I trailed wet footsteps all ...”