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“... that he and Yealland are in the same business. Their function is to return men to the active service which has broken them. For all his sympathetic powers of observation and generous tolerance, Rivers cannot but act, in the end, as an instrument of control. Whether it is right for him to acquiesce in this process is something which he comes increasingly ...”

“... Meanwhile, the women at home were freeing themselves from the worst tyrannies of domestic service, often earning high wages in the munitions factories, and finding some degree of the freedom that the men at the front had lost. The cultural anxieties provoked by the faltering definitions of gender pervade Barker’s novel. Aberrant groups are ...”

“... a man who lived down his earlier reputation as a radical to bring his biting sarcasm to the service of the Tories, always able to command an appreciative audience, albeit one with greater relish for his wit than respect for his political judgment. So much for John Vincent, the brilliant author of The Formation of the Liberal Party who became the ...”

“... One of the remarkable things about this case was the sentences handed down by Chief Justice Robert Lowry. While McCaughey and Weir were given life sentences, the other policemen involved in the bar bombing were let off with suspended sentences. McCaughey’s father, who aided his son in concealing the priest on his farm, was also released with a ...”

“... in one of the last coach and horse mail vans: in 1904 the first combustion engine motor-car service was introduced by the New Zealand Postal Service. For more than twenty-five years, the fate of the Lake Taupo was unclear. Then, in 1930, Jack Dennet, a farmer and amateur philatelist in Lincolnshire, discovered it in ...”

“... to infect them. Southall’s worries about the role of ships in transporting bedbugs persisted. Robert Usinger, the author of the monumental Monograph of Cimicidae (the family to which the bedbug belongs), saw a thriving colony of the tropical bedbug, Cimex hemipterus, on a liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But local transport is just as much ...”

“... first few years of their existence is integral to this strategy. People must be lured into using a service and then kept using it by whatever means necessary; only later is this power converted into revenue. To suggest that a Facebook user consents to all the ways Facebook uses or might use their data is completely to misrepresent the logic at work here. For ...”

“... object, as some will, to foxes being killed in their gardens. For those uncertain what a coffee service looks like, there is a drawing of one. Marginally more useful, perhaps, is the page of diagrams showing how and how not to eat peas. Quite a few of us will be unfamiliar with the use of loving-cups and rose bowls, or with the technique of taking snuff ...”

“... the Great War (2012), a superb study by Thomas Dilworth, we learn that Jones had seen more active service than any other war writer including Edmund Blunden, who’s normally credited with this debilitating honour. ‘Even with the time subtracted for convalescence and leave, he spent a total of 117 weeks at the front, which is at least two months longer than ...”

“... faulty passages, but I know of no poet in any language who has written so much that is good,’ Robert Southey wrote (the declaration is emblazoned on the dust-jacket of Juliet Barker’s new Life). Yet any sense of this – of the subtle, elementary qualities of Wordsworth’s verse – is rarely apparent to those who study him, and rarely apparent in the ...”

“... to evoke three generations of the Beech family – a dynasty which spans the 20th century. Robert, a First World War hero in his youth, became a successful armaments manufacturer, dominating the family and the family business until he was killed in 1972 by a terrorist car-bomb just outside his house. Harry, his son, refused to take over the Beech ...”

“... in Bevan’s home town, Tredegar; he was a small boy when Bevan was founding the National Health Service, was raised in one of the prefabricated bungalows built by Bevan when Minister of Housing; a teenager during the Bevanite wrangles of the Fifties, he was taken by his father to hear Bevan speak; he read In Place of Fear soon after it came out (and ...”

“... Robert Vitalis​ tells a great story about how he came to write this book. Some years ago, sitting in the Clark University library avoiding grading his students’ final exams, he pulled an old history of the university off the shelf. Clark played a key role in the birth of the field of international relations in the two decades before the First World War, he read, especially by founding and supporting one of the new discipline’s flagship journals, the Journal of Race Development ...”

“... commonly posed or faked, to its over-simplistic headlines and its unintentional absurdities. Robert Kee’s The World We Left Behind shows that one can make up an interesting and agreeable book almost solely from this source. It isn’t ‘social history’, since, as it moves from 1 January 1939 to 31 December, it is largely concerned with ...”

“... Bagehot undoubtedly was, thoroughly, professionally and ancestrally: a banker. His grandfather Robert Bagehot was a West Country merchant who shipped goods up the River Parrett under the name of the Somerset Trading Company. Robert’s younger son, Thomas, married the niece of Samuel Stuckey, the founder of Stuckey’s ...”