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“... furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen ...”

“... surprise and intensely interesting. Among the good ones are ‘The Old House at Home’, about Old John McSorley and his son Old Bill, who founded and carried on McSorley’s Old Ale House in New York’s East Village; the already described ‘Mazie’ and ‘Lady Olga’; and ‘The Mohawks in High Steel’, which, along with much else, is one of the best ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... themselves into trouble. Last year, Jo Shuter, the former head of Quintin Kynaston Academy in St John’s Wood, was banned from teaching after admitting to widespread misuse of public funds – using school money for taxis, phones and a great many flowers, plus £7000 for her 50th birthday party and £8269 for a boutique-hotel jolly for senior staff. The ...”

“... by an old and unamused Queen Victoria and an equally unsmiling Elizabeth I, bore the slogan: ‘Baker Street Madam Offers Domination, Correction and Discipline.’ According to the logic of this advertisement, the commercial basis of the waxworks may tame this fearsome trio by portraying them as prostitutes, but British subjects are still intended to abase ...”

“... have to be taken away to a place of safety; the boy is later released. The ludicrous Mr Kenneth Baker blames the Church, and in particular the Bishop of Liverpool, David Sheppard, probably because he’s the only socialist in sight.22 February. A large crowd gathers outside Bootle Magistrates Court, to jeer as the vans carrying the two ten-year-olds accused ...”

“... early 1980s were fronted by gay men, Steve Strange, Jimmy Somerville, Pete Burns, Boy George, Leee John, Morrissey, Billy Mackenzie, Holly Johnson and Marc Almond among them.Not since the Supremes and Diana Ross had a pop group produced a lead singer so clearly destined for solo success. ‘Careless Whisper’, though co-written with Ridgeley, had shown that ...”

“... to shield him from the charge of being a closet republican, or a classical republican like John Toland. He believes in a ‘legal limited monarchy’, and has a humane idea of consensus and national unity within such an arrangement. He is an active, adept pragmatist, a revolutionary moderate. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe speaks of Crusoe’s ‘life of ...”

“... examined by two clerks from the Special Investigation Branch. Looking through the periscope, Edwin Baker, one of the clerks, saw Miss Swan’s hand posting the letter to the sanitary inspector along with a letter addressed to her sister in Woking. The stamps on both letters had been marked with invisible ink, and had been sold to Swan at the request of the ...”

“... would be seen through its ogival windows. What bells had not been evacuated from St Catherine, St John, St Brigit, Saints Barbara, Elizabeth, Peter and Paul, from Trinity to Corpus Christi, melted in their belfries and dripped away without pomp or ceremony. In the Big Mill red wheat was milled. Butcher Street smelled of burnt Sunday roast. The Municipal ...”

“... an ‘example of unfair burden sharing’ and ‘using a hatchet when you need a scalpel’ when John McCain proposed it during the campaign of 2008. In the same speech, Obama embraced the false analogy between federal budgets and household budgets, overlooking (for starters) the government’s control of taxation and the money supply. ‘Families across the ...”

“... poet, bioregionalist, teacher. Having bought out his early partners, Allen Ginsberg and Dick Baker, he is the sole proprietor of this estate, a hundred acres of manzanita thickets, with open stretches of ponderosa pine, black oak, cedar, madrone, Douglas fir, bunchgrass – and one of the most seductive houses in America, self-conceived and ...”

“... military establishment and the new government in Washington, a town presided over by another John/Jack the lad. Profumo’s go-getting reputation and unstuffy demeanour made him attractive to the men around JFK, who liked that he didn’t seem like a typical Brit, never mind a typical Tory. He was extremely sociable, and well suited to the work ...”

“... a problem. Many of the ‘first families of Virginia’ prided themselves on being descendants of John Rolfe, an early settler at Jamestown, and his wife, the Indian ‘princess’ Pocahontas. The new ‘one-drop rule’ meant that they might find themselves prohibited from marrying a white person – or even classed as ‘coloured’ themselves. After much ...”

“... ease with which a surgeon makes an incision, or a paleographer reads a manuscript, or a French baker slashes each baguette before it goes in the oven. It’s a matter of doing, not knowing, and it is gained gradually, through imitative practice.‘What has tended to be marginalised in the more recent history of imitation,’ Burrow writes, ‘is the aspect ...”