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“... architect of public buildings. The painstakingly detailed plans and designs he prepared for County Hall, a massive riverside headquarters for the London County Council, engrossed him for most of 1907. It was his reverential response to Greenwich Hospital, in a style he christened Wrennaissance. He was mortified to lose, especially since one of the judges was ...”

“... supported by the money his brother made. His even greater good fortune was to have an uncle, Richard Lloyd, who believed in him and backed him, convinced that he was a prodigy – an opinion Lloyd George shared. From the earliest days, there were scandals relating to affairs and paternity suits to be hushed up; the list of his conquests would include ...”

“... set within a shopping mall, Grand Central, which blurs into another shopping mall, the Bull Ring. Richard Vinen, writing the first serious history of Birmingham in a long while, is aware of how hard it is to pin the city down, to explain what it is or what it is for. Planners in the 1960s, he says, ‘were sometimes perplexed as to why Birmingham had been ...”

“... is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of Richard Arkwright. Miss Cracroft from the same year is a tumble of satin and lace; a veil blows from her shoulder and flowers garland her bosom, but despite the mobile stuffs her face is as still, her back as rigid, as Anne Bateman’s. The catalogue suggests ...”

“... from the glaze in beholders’ eyes. Searching for the ‘real’ one is like chasing quarry in a hall of mirrors. In this delusive environment, Flint is an admirable Ariadne, who guides us close to the source of the reflections. She unwinds three distinct threads. First, she exhibits Columbus’s reading and map-reading. She scours the margins of his ...”

“... had, after all, reached its climax in Wales. In the summer of 1399, the shattering deposition of Richard II, the ultimate de jure monarch of the old medieval order, removed the last king of Britain who ruled by undisputed hereditary right. Enough princely blood ran in Glyn Dŵr’s veins to lend a certain legitimacy to his title and to the revolt mounted in ...”

“... In the closing stages of Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of Joe DiMaggio there is an exchange between the baseball legend and a man called Cappy Harada for whom DiMaggio had done a bit of business. The episode is undated in the book, but took place some time before the San Francisco earthquake of 1989, at which time DiMaggio was 74 ...”

“... commitment to musical polyphony was bound to set him at odds with the culture of the concert hall and the piano business. The musical repertoire best suited to that culture, because specifically written for it, is one in which polyphonic values are suppressed in favour of drama and virtuoso display. Gould found this music uninteresting and aesthetically ...”

“... it has to be admitted that there is not much left of the carcase of Pirenne’s thesis. Yet, as Richard Hodges says, it obstinately refuses to disappear. If one reason for this is that economists never agree, another, as he also says, is that the very sparseness of the evidence leaves almost infinite room for argument: we have, for example, no early ...”

“... to another. The Lasts live on a ‘nice little estate’ and their house has an oak-panelled hall which is the diarist’s especial pride. They run a car until mid-1942. So far, so ordinary. Mrs Last busies herself mightily to raise funds for hospital supplies and prisoner-of-war parcels, and later helps in a canteen. The assiduity with which she ...”

“... by warders and barbed wire, and a life-sized doll hanging from a chandelier. In the entrance hall, rows of prosthetic eyeballs are fixed to the wall. The agents opened the door with a crowbar and, according to federal prosecutors who spoke to the New York Times, ‘seized photographs of nude underage girls’. Evidence has been piling up that Epstein was ...”

“... was founded on a crime (he deposed, imprisoned and some would say caused the death of his cousin Richard II, who had once been his playmate). Caught between self-command and the most crushing self-doubt, Walter knew how to rise to this part and bring it down in the same breath. The king is wan with care and insomnia – he is guilty. He is also ...”

“... remembered for its illustrations by A.S. Forrest, a succession of poignant tableaux like a village hall pageant. The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as ...”

“... was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all that a socially aware person of the Nineties could decently be aware of. He was a Unitarian, but in full Puritan ...”

“... his writing, and we are told that Emerson kept a print of Vesuvius in eruption in his front hall at Concord all his life. More than once, Richardson makes claims for Emerson as a sort of closet Dionysus, quoting from his journal: ‘O Bacchus, make them drunk, drive them mad, this multitude of vagabonds, hungry for eloquence, hungry for poetry, starving ...”