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“... To the rat-a-tat-tat​ of a drum, they march on London. Climate protesters? Milk-price complainers taking inspiration from their cousins across the Channel? Some historical re-enactment rump? It must be charity. Look at the cameras. There aren’t enough of them to bring out Boris Johnson, who never failed, in all the years of his mayoralty, to insert himself on the television ‘news where you are’ for London: in hardhat, bicycle helmet, scrumcap squashed down on the finger-flicked golden mopflop of thuggish charm ...”

“... whom would ever feel comfortable with English, he was telling the world, in his own words, about Jack London, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Steinbeck. He was announcing – as his exact contemporary Saul Bellow would announce a decade later in The Adventures of Augie March – a new addition to the canon of American sensibility. But the cost would be ...”

“... was black. Gates submitted it for examination to, among others, the expert who had exposed the ‘Jack the Ripper Diaries’ as a fraud. The issue of authentication was vital, and went beyond the nature of the artefact itself. Granted that the paper, ink and other external markers dated it to somewhere between 1855 and 1860, and given that the ...”

“... in the North Sea, anxiety about Britain’s industrial decline and the sudden Middle East oil price hike after the Yom Kippur war of 1973 meant that nationalist economics no longer seemed so daft or unworldly. The energy crisis contributed to political instability at Westminster. In the indecisive general election of February 1974, the SNP took seven ...”

“... At a Downing Street meeting in November 2002 attended by Tony Blair, Jack Straw and six academics familiar with Iraq and the Middle East, two things became clear. The first was that Straw thought post-Saddam Iraq would be much like post-Soviet Russia and could thus be easily pigeonholed as that strange creature, a ‘transitional society ...”

“... of Sonny Bono’s Flintstone-style waistcoats) and a tissue jacket. What did that book cost? The price of a Styrofoam bucket of Starbucks coffee-type coffee? Moving, from Cape Goliard in 1971, still had the look: Joe Brainard illustrations and a reproduced Camel cigarette packet: ‘from use’. The full works – chocolate-brown cloth, Brainard ...”

“... household, with a stern, distant mother who never hugged or kissed her; her beloved father, a jack-of-all-trades, was sidelined by illness during part of her childhood, which deprived him of a breadwinner’s authority. Emotional impoverishment was an even greater deprivation than lack of money. The sadness which would seep into her songs contained a ...”

“... one of the owners sold me a 17th-century Latin book on Druids that I couldn’t afford at half-price (‘rainy day special’, he explained). Higher-end bookshops offered incunabula and Aldines, first editions of Gibbon and Austen to discriminating buyers who had real money.If you didn’t, you could explore the riches available in public collections. New ...”

“... the County of Northampton’. The principal purpose of enclosure was to increase profits, but the price of ‘Improvement’ was the loss of the commons and waste grounds, which according to the Act ‘yield but little Profit’. It took until 1820 to bring the enclosure fully into effect (nearby Castor stayed unenclosed until 1898). Laxton in Nottinghamshire ...”

“... of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack Fairweather writes in his powerful history of the war. The instruction was, it seems, hardly needed. The fall of Musa Qala in 2013, ‘once the focus of the British military’s anxiety about their standing in the world, barely registered in the national ...”

“... time she appears in The Prince and the Showgirl, she lights up the scene (the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said that she glowed). That is just one of the things about her that makes her inimitable – which is why the recent My Week with Marilyn could not but fail somewhere as a film. But the question of what – in the aura that surrounds her – she was ...”

“... Nixon came to office as the friend of the hard Right and then turned turtle and imposed wage and price controls. The natural ally of corner-cutting businessmen, he emerged as the most progressive environmentalist since Teddy Roosevelt, pushing through a mass of anti-pollution legislation, creating the Environmental Protection Agency and showing an absolute ...”

“... Bird’s melodrama The Gladiator (1831), and the anti-aristocratic hero of Robert Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835), a martyr who dies with the words: ‘The bondman is avenged, my country free!’ Perhaps surprisingly, Forrest did not play the libertarian Brutus, though this was for aesthetic rather than ideological reasons: by his standards it wasn’t a ...”

“... in the spacious porch, there is a plaster bas-relief of the Massacre of the Innocents. The asking price for the house was £1.2 million. The figure would have astonished Thomas Stevenson, who was described by one of his wife’s bridesmaids as a husband both ‘grave and scientific’. Their only child was born in the back room downstairs. His mother wrote to ...”

“... followed. And Berenson then embarked on his dramatic apprenticeship in buying and advising ‘Mrs Jack’ Gardner, resolved to stock Fenway Court ‘with only the greatest paintings in the world’. They were supplied forthwith: Titian’s ‘Rape of Europa’; Rembrandt’s 1636 self-portrait; a Philip IV by Velazquez; Rubens’s Earl of Arundel – all for ...”