“... of gestation has had on a work. In the case of Braudel’s books (for The Mediterranean also took over twenty-five years to complete), it has produced a study of incredible richness and wisdom. The text, tables, illustrations, maps and captions all shed a light on everyday life in early modern Europe that is always fresh, interesting and convincing. Let ...”

“... not free to marry him, thereby furnishing protection from decisive action.’ Lord Byron (also on John Murray’s list) once remarked: Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life? Russell never married. He was of that company called ‘the lost generation’, as described by Jeanne Mackenzie in Children of ...”

“... resentment that was mounting against postwar liberalism. This coalition drew support from the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party, but also from working-class people affected by deindustrialisation, who often had roots in the same outer-borough neighbourhoods as the guards and the police. In 1970, a new union boss, Leo Zeferetti, steered COBA ...”

“... diary extracts were used to accompany an exhibition of her husband’s photographs). The couple took the Smithsons and Paolozzi on ethnographic tours around the impoverished, bomb-damaged streets, where they were tutored in what the Hendersons saw as the vibrant theatre of working-class life. The Smithsons said that these ‘compulsive walks’ were ‘the ...”

“... This was colloquially known as the royal numerals case, brought by the nationalist politician John MacCormick against the assumption by the new queen of the style Elizabeth II – though she was patently the first monarch by the name of Elizabeth to reign over the post-1707 United Kingdom. Although Cooper found that MacCormick had no standing to bring the ...”

“... work. Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04 incorporate passages of literary and art criticism (on John Ashbery’s poems, or Christian Marclay’s film The Clock) into their narratives, some of it taken almost verbatim from Lerner’s own published essays. It’s a remarkable thing to create a narrator who can credibly launch into actual written criticism in ...”

“... this deadpan claim to literary originality: Swift lifted these words from the Restoration poet Sir John Denham’s praise of Abraham Cowley: ‘To him no author was unknown,/Yet what he wrote was all his own.’ As it happens, it was Cowley’s rhapsodic style Swift began his career by imitating, so that (he bragged to a cousin in 1692) ‘when I writt what ...”

“... effects, unsullied on this occasion by the use of the first person and the other mannerisms that took over early and hardened with time. One of his chief gifts is to atomise and reorganise letters, words, punctuation and parts of speech, and in that way disrupt our habituated ways of reading for meaning. By forcing the eye to move in unexpected ways he ...”

“... of The Last English Poachers, written by Bob, his son Brian (also a poacher) and a ghost called John McDonald, is more punk than its predecessors’. The Robin Hood aspect is to the fore. The Toveys see themselves as the rural frontline in the class war, and their book is full of contempt for rural toffs, or ‘ya-yas’, also called ‘saddle-bumpers’ by ...”

“... as Hugh Casson later wrote, was ‘a performance’. Few people felt they knew what lay behind it. John Betjeman knew more than most and was probably Lancaster’s closest friend. They met at Oxford and soon realised that they shared a sense of humour and a passion for architecture which was the basis of an enduring friendship. When Betjeman became assistant ...”

“... Westminster seat, in a by-election protest vote in 1945. But Winnie Ewing’s victory in Hamilton took a very safe seat out of Labour’s grip. The defeat, according to a contemporary Nationalist observer, Oliver Brown, sent a shiver along the Labour benches ‘looking for a spine to run up’. The Scottish Labour vote was managed at this point by Willie ...”

“... stool’. Danish blue made an occasional appearance too, which Jonathan liked but his father ‘took a dim view of because it didn’t taste of cow’. An altogether different list of cheese was supplied by the modern food industry, which Jonathan’s parents scorned while he ‘succumbed, shamefully, to Primula, Dairylea triangles, citric ...”

“... Dekker has a character, an actor, who boasts: ‘I have so naturally played the Puritan that many took me to be one.’ Lake agrees that the stage Puritan did much to form perceptions of Puritanism, even self-perceptions. A Northamptonshire preacher delighted in telling his auditory that godly people like themselves were caricatured and castigated by the ...”

“... to be demystified. The history of policing and punishing had its shortcomings, too. In Britain, it took the form of a Whiggish story of progress, narrated in support of reformist agendas. Fabian historians homed in on an ‘Age of Reform’ from the late 18th century: Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian penology, prison reform, campaigns against the death penalty ...”

“... afraid of things that may possibly happen in this country to them,’ the Los Angeles Archbishop John Cantwell observed in a letter to the Archbishop of Cincinnati in July 1933. The Hollywood Question was now a political matter. Anti-semitic stereotypes were employed by both supporters and opponents of Upton Sinclair’s campaign for Governor of ...”