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“... pantofles’), ‘so they be not … mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth’. As Leah Price showed recently in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, we can do many things to books other than read them. Today we’re inclined to see such losses as unfortunate, even criminal, but early modern bibliophiles were quite happy for most texts ...”

“... where Stephen says: ‘Tell me the word, mother, if you know now. The word known to all men.’ Richard Ellmann virtually solved it in Ulysses on the Liffey (1972) with his chapter called ‘The Riddle of Scylla and Charybdis’, which argues that ‘the answer to the sphinx’s riddle was man, the answer to Scylla-Charybdis’s is the act of love.’ But ...”

“... can find no better way of assessing the real value of world currencies than comparing the local price of a Big Mac against a US standard. Belief in the stable identity of the product, wherever in the world it may be consumed, is one of the conditions of its success. Stability across space and time is central to both the notion and the value of a brand, and ...”

“... risk inflation by goosing the economy with easy money in order to buy support from the voters. Price stability requires long-term thinking; but the public wants instant gratification. Without constraints, democracies are bad at self-preservation. It’s for this reason that most central banks are kept formally independent of the elected branches of ...”

“... colleagues at Chalk Farm library, where she’d been working, to look at the draft of The Bride Price, and when they encouraged her, she gave it to Onwordi, whom she had to beg to read it. His reaction when he did was to burn the handwritten manuscript, like a male Hedda Gabler. There followed a dangerous period where she bore his beatings and gave in to ...”

“... during the Thirties; each was an important art-collector. But there the resemblance ends. Hugh Richard Arthur Grosvenor (1879-1953), Duke of Westminster – called Bend’Or from the family coat of arms – was the product of a landed Cheshire family whose estate, Eaton Hall south of Liverpool, dated from the 15th century. The family’s first hereditary ...”

“... events have not much changed my mind. Though the Oxford editors are too honourable to notice, a price has now been set on their skills. This price goes up and down with the fate of ‘Shall I die?’ Phoned by the Standard, I say the poem’s a dud and the London market’s that bit more bearish. Guiltily, when La Stampa ...”

“... with atheism, libertinism and violent revolution. Openly atheistic tracts by such agitators as Richard Carlile were sold under the counter and were often written from prison. As Secord observes, such works ‘had long been available to the wealthy and discreet, and were sold in much the same way (and sometimes through the same channels) as ...”

“... And finally, after re-establishing contact with Amy Bellette, he finds himself entangled with Richard Kliman, a ruthless young scholar who is writing E.I. Lonoff’s biography, in which he will reveal the scandal buried far in his subject’s past which he believes is the key to Lonoff’s work. Which reminds us of the incestuous relationship with his ...”

“... written for medical journals in a subsequent attempt to figure out her condition. In 1978, Richard Altick put together the pieces of her story in The Shows of London. Until very recently (as far as I could tell), Altick was the only person outside the medical profession who had written about her this century. Now Jan Bondeson, whose paper on her ...”

“... if it brings more readers/viewers/listeners to the subject’s work. Thus when Kirk Douglas or Richard Adams or Melvyn Bragg ‘agrees to see me’ shortly before their new book comes out, they are not doing it out of the kindness of their hearts but in hopes of a socking great plug. And even if I say their book is lousy, their publishers will still ...”

“... by Al Alvarez’s little piece, ‘Doctor in the House’, which turns out not to be a homage to Richard Gordon (sadly), but a two-and-a-half-page chat about the problems of getting his house redecorated. Mr Alvarez’s wife makes no fewer than seven appearances in this brief narrative, yet her name is not mentioned once: this in spite of the fact that the ...”

“... has been achieved at a terrible cost is to invite the retort that it was obvious that some price had to be paid. The charge that none of this was promised in 1979, and indeed was specifically scouted, is regarded as a rather tiresome piece of pedantry. Obviously the world recession provides some extenuation of Thatcher’s record at home, and it ...”

“... the end of the 18th century topography is firmly part of English landscape painting in the work of Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, all of whom are represented. The value of this book to architectural historians is immense, since many of the houses illustrated have since been altered or rebuilt, or have altogether disappeared, like the ...”

“... called ‘Our Precious Isles’, like a half-remembered allusion to John of Gaunt’s diatribe in Richard II, conjuring the ‘sceptred isle’ and ‘precious stone set in the silver sea’ popular with mawkish patriots who for some reason always stop quoting the speech before they get to the bit about England being ‘now bound in with shame’ having ...”