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“... was Coleridge.’ After spending the day with him, de Quincey walked home over a distance of 40 miles, alone, at night. He met no one on this journey, passing through the silenced tollgates, his mind filled with thoughts of ‘the greatest man that has ever appeared’. Gradually de Quincey entered the Coleridge family circle, and this secured his visit to ...”

“... revival school of Aldo Rossi in Italy – and the New York Five, particularly Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier, with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone ...”

“... seems the days are gone when one could read Muldoon simply unaided.) With Madoc I read Richard Holmes’s Coleridge: Early Visions. Ironically, this wasn’t used by Muldoon: Madoc would have been finished by the autumn of 1989, when it came out. Some astonishing correspondences between the two books are therefore coincidental, the meeting of two ...”

“... of the Kittredge biography that Sir Thomas Malory had begun his military career under Sir Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick and paragon of chivalry; but this would have had him starting his criminal career in his fifties and writing the Morte Darthur in his seventies. Field shows easily that Beauchamp’s retainer must have been another man. Malory ...”

“... in as some of the characters of the Great Plains, the vast tract of prairie stretching 2500 miles down the centre of the United States alongside the eastern edge of the Rockies – but Frazier’s real success is to evoke the Great Plains’ unpeopled, unpunctuated desertion. A spooky land of endless straight roads, two-bit cowtowns and the occasional ...”

“... these ventures to succeed. No Farinelli or Senesino, no Cuzzoni or Faustina, have ever been within miles of the financial range of our revivalists. With singers well-known on our amateur choral circuit, Lewis and Farncombe have consistently shown us the glory of Handel’s devotion to the theatre. This allows Jonathan Keates to get the balance right in his ...”

“... constrain the individual: history, imperial grandeur, Classicism, high culture – even villages. (Richard Hofstadter once explained how the ceaseless lure of land inhibited the growth of village settlements and led to the habit of continually pulling up stakes.) Repeatedly, in diaries, journals, letters, ‘official’ histories, promotional tracts and works ...”

“... with a crop of plantains. The palm-trees look scorched, withered, unlike the glossy ones a few miles north of South Central in Inglewood. A red van looms stockily in the rear view as I’m passing brakeshops and tyreshops and a place where they recycle aluminium cans. There are two figures in the van I can’t make out any more because the early afternoon ...”

“... have the bright idea of taking that pompous phrase literally and pretending that he and his foil, Richard Murdoch, were living in a flat at the top of Broadcasting House. For some reason this fancy captivated the nation, and from it developed a wonderful gallimaufry of imaginary characters – Lewis the Goat, Mrs Bagwash, her daughter Nausea. It established ...”

“... a par with Samuel Johnson’s. He noted that Bage had ‘very seldom’ travelled more than fifty miles from home, had never spent more than a week in London, and considered him raised ‘in the bosom of rusticity’. The truth was rather different. Though not formally associated with any group, Bage had links through Erasmus Darwin with both the Lichfield ...”

“... The relative humidity is 56, the winds are south-westerly at seven mph, visibility stands at six miles. What do those numbers really signify? The temperature doesn’t sound extreme, yet when I leave my air-conditioned house I don’t feel that I’m stepping outside so much as entering another atmosphere. My spirits sag, my lips soon taste of sweat. Is this ...”

“... have been major investigations in Scotland (the Calman Commission of 2007-8) and Wales – the Richard Commission (2002-4), the Holtham Commission (2007-10) and the Silk Commission (2011-14) – into the broader operation of devolution and the funding mechanisms that support it. Anxiety has focused not only on relations between Westminster and the ...”

“... dumbfoundingly small. Donatello by way of Brancusi, smoothed simplicity. One hundred sixty-four miles an hour. The Ducati 916 is a nightingale. It sings to me more sweetly than Cole Porter. Slender as a girl, aerodynamically clean. Sudden as a shark. Seidel’s first book, Final Solutions, caused a minor scandal when it was chosen to receive a small award ...”

“... in the name of objective science. The cycle was repeated in 1994 with the publication of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, which extended Jensen’s basic thesis into a 900-page exposition of the genetic bases of social inequality, crime, poverty and unemployment. In the meantime, a re-examination of Cyril Burt’s work in ...”

“... The Cradle Will Rock and attaches suitable significance to Welles’s 1941 Broadway staging of Richard Wright’s Native Son, which was no less daring than Citizen Kane. In any case, it would be impossible to ignore politics when writing about Welles’s wartime activities, and especially the ill-fated government-subsidised documentary It’s All True, the ...”