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“... bones’ and he was ‘incessantly smoking cigarettes, the long fingers straying to the straggling brown moustache’. Crane smoked as if cigarettes alone were keeping him alive. ‘He could not talk,’ a niece wrote, ‘unless he was walking up and down the room with his hands stuffed into his pockets and a cigarette balanced on his lips.’ It is this niece ...”

“... hiding. By adopting the persona of a fanatical Tory High Churchman, he scuppered the passage of a Bill outlawing occasional conformity. The Government was angry at Defoe, who in Novak’s phrase ‘slipped over the edge of the abyss’, and it announced a reward of £50 for the apprehension of ‘Daniel de Fooe’, the author of a ‘scandalous and ...”

“... or pools, each named after an Ovidian legend of loss of love; the second is a brown pool in a torrential stream between steep English hillsides. The sequence, recording ‘Epiphanies all around us Always perhaps’, in a sense finds no answer to its opening question: ‘And what’s to be made of that?’ Any sense of answer or ...”

“... patter – , and, contradicting her, the vicar, a timid man (large Adam’s apple), with a brown-eyed, canine squint, chokes upon a nervous cough. 3 Tea stronger than a Munich beer. In the room the air is hazy. In the hearth a flamelet lazy gleams, like a butterfly on boulders. I’ve overstayed – it’s time to go now … I rise; a nod, and then ...”

“... NHS glasses and studiously just-fell-out-of-bed hair. Damon Albarn tries to do a bit of a Pinkie Brown psych-ward glare but it’s pitiable – a strong breeze would knock him over. And is that shirt unironed? Mod! You mugging me off? It’s four art-school herberts leaning against a car that’s not their own in a world that’s not their own, that refers ...”

“... Allowance, or – if you prefer – you could use it to pay for the BBC and throw in the wage bill of the Royal Navy. Unfortunately, Oxera’s method involved questionable assumptions about interest rates and the exact nature of the put option, and further analysis by economists at the Bank of England suggests that the true value of the option (and ...”

“... complex jostling over the rules. In the months leading up to the eventual signing of the bill by President Bush on 15 November 1990, there was intense lobbying for provisions that would favour mining and/or utility interests in particular states by introducing exceptions to the baseline allocation of 2.5lb of sulphur dioxide per million British ...”

“... In​ 1959, Morante travelled to the US, where she fell in love with a young painter called Bill Morrow. He was, Tuck writes, ‘the sort of person everyone – men, women, children – fell in love with (in retrospect, this may have been part of his problem)’, and he was predominantly a lover of men. Morante brought him back to Rome and rented a flat ...”

“... year’s Bafta-winning single drama, the Stephen Frears/ Peter Morgan dramatisation of the Blair/ Brown relationship, The Deal). Despite Born’s claim that recent British TV drama had ‘a low tolerance for formal innovation’, many of the innovative devices associated with high-art drama are now staples of mass-market popular serials, from ...”

“... benefit from using them. We may have a rough understanding of scientific method, and even a rough Bill Brysonish sense of some of the science involved, but that is about it; our attitude contains significant components of faith and trust and incomprehension, while at the same time we are grateful for the wonders modern science has brought us. Our faith-based ...”

“... gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and it passed only with support from the opposition). The result was that Cameron went into the 2015 election with the referendum as a manifesto promise, and unexpectedly won it. The referendum went ahead just over a year later, on 23 June 2016. Cameron ...”

“... in violet ink on shiny paper so that the lettering was always slightly blurred. Each double bill had a page devoted to it, and it was a rule of our family, originating probably from my mother, who liked rules without reason, that only on a Thursday morning, and then with her permission, and under her direct supervision, could the programme be picked ...”

“... doctors, and – most troublesome of all – win the backing of a sceptical Cabinet. The NHS Bill received Royal Assent on 6 November 1946. The doctors, outraged at Bevan’s proposals, channelled their opposition through a profoundly reactionary BMA. Webster’s account of all this is sketchy, perhaps because he has covered the ground in previous ...”

“... show wasn’t very interesting to a seven-year-old and, though they sometimes had pop stars on the bill, it was mostly dancers and novelty acts. Soon my loyalties switched to Juke Box Jury, where you could hear the latest releases and the panellists were slender and nice-looking, with beehive hairdos and Mod dresses, like my cousin Madeleine. They weren’t as ...”

“... Doris was​ in her early forties when I arrived in my vile mustard-coloured coat with a brown velvet collar, my first ‘grown-up’ item of clothing. It was hung in the airing cupboard alongside some marijuana that Doris had grown in the garden her first summer in the house and was now drying out. I never wore the coat again, though we did smoke the dope ...”