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“... something. He could be extremely funny: the Big Friendly Giant, who gets confused over words, says Nicholas Nickleby is by ‘Dahl’s Chickens’. He could write a mean vivid short sentence. But his key skill was his ability to repress nastiness while keeping it visible. His children’s books are as packed with threat and as top-dressed with sugary allure as ...”

“... from Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’. The Virgin Mary – modelled by Jane – tends to St Nicholas, who had his throat cut by the Jews before miraculously returning to life.Furnishing the Red House inspired Morris to set up the Firm (it did not become Morris and Co. until 1875, when he bought out his founding partners). It initially traded on the ...”

“... action’ to a foreground scene of some talk at another table between John Standing, playing Nicholas Jenkins, and Jeremy Clyde, playing Roddie Cutts. Christopher Morahan wants our table to be having an animated and amusing conversation, with Sillery the life and soul of the party. There is one problem with this and that is that the MPs are played by ...”

“... on climate change is about to require doing things that are not popular. In his eponymous report, Nicholas Stern has argued that it would cost about 1 per cent of global GDP now to prevent a loss of 5 per cent of global GDP in the future. The calculation is tweaked to make the cost now sound manageably small – but it is not yet clear whether Western ...”

“... across his book. But his argument shifts the main burden of explanation, as William Lamont and Nicholas Tyacke have shifted it, onto the reign of Charles I and the regime of Archbishop Laud, ‘the greatest calamity ever visited upon the English Church’. Although that verdict is unlikely to go unchallenged, even those who question it should welcome ...”

“... The new ideology was fiercely resisted by the upholders of older pieties. In Utopia (1516), Sir Thomas More, though himself a considerable landowner, denounces the powerful magnates who ‘enclose all into pastures’ and demolish houses and entire villages to make sheep runs. ‘The rich men, not only by private fraud but also by common laws, do every day ...”

“... for ‘cheating a Derbyshire gentleman with counters instead of silver’, and a burglar, Thomas Mason (‘alias Humming Tom’), who had broken into the house of Sir Walter Cope. There was the woman from Finsbury accused of ‘cozening Elizabeth Barnes of certain money for a little powder in a paper’: she had promised that Elizabeth ‘should have ...”

“... with other SF writers as with other easy-to-teach academic staples of American postmodernism – Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, say, or Don DeLillo’s White Noise. That alignment has made him easier for the academy to accept. Dick’s plotting can be a delight, or a letdown, or both. Several of these nine novels rely on time travel for their ...”

“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”

“... the reformer Granville Sharp prosecuted a man named Stapylton who had taken his runaway slave, Thomas Lewis, forcibly on board ship. The trial judge, Lord Mansfield, tried to evade the moral issue by directing the jury that the case depended simply on whether Lewis was Stapylton’s property. The jury returned a verdict that Lewis was not, but Mansfield ...”

“... as he sometimes does. But Gifford tells us that Edward VII had tattoos, as did George V, as did Nicholas II of Russia and Alphonso XII of Spain, not to speak of Lady Randolph Churchill. Slote, Mamigonian and Turner add that Edward VII ‘received his first tattoo in 1862’, and then give us a source for this, as they generally do. But they don’t always ...”

“... Once again their ages aren’t specified, though eventually Roland is revealed as the youngest and Nicholas must be the oldest since their mother singles him out for scolding. David and Helen are in the middle, one way or the other – these are the only siblings in human history for whom birth order has no significance. If Garner, an only child ...”

“... of breaststroking on a kindly thermal above the lesser towers and steeples of London, like St Nicholas of Bari in the quattrocento painting by Bicci di Lorenzo in the Ashmolean. But the fantasy doesn’t quite play. The integrity of the view is broken by squared columns and the metal frames of window panels, turning the spread of the city below into a ...”

“... cellars, cooperage, cobbled yards – acted, along with the Spitalfields fruit and veg market and Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, as a buffer-reef against the encroachment of the City. A benevolent and paternalistic employer was lost, along with the heady drench of hops from the brewery and the wild gardens of adjacent streets. Joseph flogged the ...”

“... have been involved in simultaneously writing The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist, then beginning Nicholas Nickleby nine months before Oliver Twist was finished as relentless monthly serialisation schedules obliged him to meet deadline after deadline. By the time the tenth and last child was born, he was publishing his ninth novel. He was also editing ...”