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“... A couple of nights before I first saw the Richter show at Tate Modern I had been at the Festival Hall listening to Boulez conduct his Pli selon pli. I felt then, as the octogenarian directed us through his atrocious and wonderful labyrinth, that it was sheer luck – the luck of a lifetime – to have caught this last intransigence of modernism on the wing ...”

“... seed the lessons of modern art in Britain.These early influences are apparent in Sickert’s music-hall interiors of the late 1880s and early 1890s. Whistler is there in the control of low tones: the effects of artificial light in near darkness are conveyed by deep reds (on plush curtains and performers’ dresses) that are alternately ashy and warmly ...”

“... both national and televisual – that made them possible. To accept (and extend to Celtic Britain) Richard Hoggart’s assertion, in The Way We Live Now, that the English are ‘most characteristic of their collective selves when being irreverent, vulgar, nutty rather than when brought together in deference or respect for occasions invented by their ...”

“... In​ 1944, as Richard Kay records, an optimistic litigant challenged the validity of a Victorian statute under which he was being sued, on the ground that Queen Victoria, like all her predecessors since 1689, had had no title to the throne. The argument, which would have wiped the statute book almost clean, was dismissed without much ceremony; but in 1688 and 1689 it occupied the centre of the political and constitutional stage ...”

“... and law in the Jamaica controversy. He is troubled by the verdict of historians such as Catherine Hall and Stefan Collini that the organised attempts to bring Eyre and others to justice had, in Hall’s words, absolutely no effect. I doubt whether this is the real issue. Practically everything that happens has some ...”

“... Plenty, 2010). He has also published Unapologetic (2012), an Anglican riposte to the likes of Richard Dawkins that’s subtitled ‘Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense.’ Backroom Boys is billed as a ‘love letter to quiet men in pullovers’, and Spufford often seems to focus on socially or technically ...”

“... it inside myself but it was just inside my too tight underpants. Outside, in the dark of the hall I moved it to my bra.   I took the steps slowly, like a drunk. It was dark, filthy.   At the second landing I heard the door open downstairs, noises from the street. Two young boys ran up the stairs. ‘Fijate no más!’ One of them pinned me to the ...”

“... their opponents in the propaganda war by a brilliant campaign of softening up the press. Richard Evans of the Times was quoted as saying of their Press Officer, Pat Edlin: ‘He was the best Press Officer I’ve ever come across. He made press men in Whitehall or the big companies look like beginners. He ought to give lessons in it.’ Shrewder and ...”

“... heart lies with the late 18th and 20th-century music he has done so much to advance in the concert hall. Whatever the reason for this comparative slightness, it’s a pity, since it was during those years that the horn developed most rapidly. It was then that the Waldhorn picked up the valves which made it chromatic without ‘stopping’, then that it ...”

“... in 1764. Woodcut illustrations, scanty before the 19th century, can be found as early as 1681 in Richard Burton’s Historical Remarques. The great age of the London guidebook began, however, in the middle of the 19th century, as David Webb has shown in the London Journal (1980, No 2). One important development illustrates nicely that odd relationship ...”

“... the programmed reflex of hissing and snarling which would arise from the prescribed corners of the hall. He tells briefly here of his own background in Gravesend, the disabled father, the loving and loved mother, the evacuation to Canada during the war, the admiration for Gravesend’s original and idealistic MP ...”

“... in the desert south of Las Vegas. (‘Boulder, not Hoover,’ I hear him growling.) The geographer Richard Walker and I had been teaching a seminar at Berkeley on ‘consumer society’ and we were ending term with a field trip to Vegas, and wanted Davis to meet us there. He was doubtful, for reasons easily guessed; he only began to soften when he heard that ...”

“... drivers in Cornmarket. The publication of this book coincided with that of the poet and novelist Richard Gwyn’s The Vagabond’s Breakfast, another enthralling memoir of a young man going deeply and terribly astray, more or less a decade after Garfitt.* Gwyn fell even further and harder, bumming his way round southern Europe for ten years, winding up ...”

“... The haunted picture became a cliché of Gothic fiction and the scene on show is set in a lofty hall with crocketed niches and heraldic displays of armour much like Walpole’s own, across which our heroine, skirts and headdress flying, pursues the villain, who clutches a wriggling Leolyn under one arm. One of the attractions of melodrama, in both ...”

“... for lunch on the first assize day and placed his decomposing wig on the stand in the entrance hall. Lady Adrian came upon it and threw it in the bin. One of the county high sheriffs’ remaining functions, now that they’ve stopped collecting debts, is to make visiting judges welcome. ‘Well, at least you don’t have the high sheriff and his entourage ...”