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“... they would make the needful sacrifice of ease and mortification of appetite’. Poor men left the mills and shops, he explained, and immediately plunged into ‘the groggery, the cigar store, the gambling den or some other haunt of vileness’. ‘Inordinate expenditure’ always caused the misery. Foreign observers were startled at the raucous cycles of boom ...”

“... furnished the governing elite: Dalhousie, Canning, Mayo and Dufferin. The liberal quartet of the Mills (father and son), Macaulay and Henry Maine wrote a lot about India, and even more has been written about them. But theirs was largely an India of the imagination. The Mills never went; Macaulay lasted four years and Maine ...”

“... was published that it was ‘rather too light & bright & sparkling; – it wants shade.’ P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley follows in this shady tradition. In her preface, James apologises to Austen for ‘involving her beloved Elizabeth in the trauma of a murder investigation’, and imagines Austen replying ...”

“... over-represented in Griffin’s sample of exceptionally entrepreneurial individuals. At ten, James Lackington believed he would be a better salesman than the man who cried apple pies about the streets, and tells us that when he offered his services to the pie-maker they were eagerly taken up. A few years later he was able to persuade a master shoemaker ...”

“... he hammers into his texts. They are pure archive, filched from tabloid libraries: Freddie Mills posing in his trunks (low angle, hard shadows), the murdered Peter Arne (in a blizzard of newsprint dots), Charles Hawtrey having a very bad hair day after a house fire in Deal. Seabrook loves the reforgotten, the misrepresented. None of his heroes will be ...”

“... The louse-ridden condition of World War One uniforms and the horrors of child labour in the early mills are shown definitively as ‘once upon a time’. But there are some immediate accounts of what was going on: for instance, the shocked description of the ‘unnatural’ activities in New Lanark schooling – in other words, the partnering of boys and ...”

“... nature of Orientals, he was anticipating the prejudice which more than a century later had James Bond remark suavely to the half-Chinese Dr No: ‘With your disregard for human life, Dr No, the East would welcome you.’ (Dr No, to give him his due, replies that ‘East’ and ‘West’ are ‘just points of the compass each as stupid as the ...”

“... begins his Introduction by quoting from a celebrated attack on Talcott Parsons by C. Wright Mills, for whom Grand Theory was the most absurd but also the most serious impediment in the way of a sensible, informed and humane understanding of human societies. So one supposes that what is to follow is a carefully mounted assault on what the chosen ...”

“... want to overdetermine to the point of absurdity, but it seems fairly obvious that what Clive James represents is a kind of stylised distortion of what Britain sees itself as: a kind of self-possessed jokey coarseness, very smart and very educated, a sort of sharp-talking deified moron – who then has to be defined (surprise, surprise) as Australian. He ...”

“... in a dreadful state. He decided to do a little research, which took him first to the local olive mills and then all around the groves of the Mediterranean, from Palestine to Spain. The result, Olives: The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit, resembles not so much A Year in Provence as a series of feature articles about the current state of the trade. The first ...”

“... long history indeed – more than a thousand years of continuous existence, so far. This, writes James Campbell, is the defining contrast between England and the other great European states. Despite some redrawing of county boundaries in 1974, most of the administrative geography of England remains today much as it was in the tenth and 11th centuries. No ...”

“... it is not clear what they are doing here, along with such as Dugald Stewart, David Ricardo, the Mills, E.A. Freeman, Alfred Marshall and Graham Wallas. Are these the First Eleven, or just the first eleven names that cropped up? When the Whigs were in charge, at least we used to have an identifiable team of All Stars, whom the fans either loved or loved to ...”

“... something nouveau about the new bonkbusters that perfectly suited the times. A point made by Clive James in these pages in a review of Princess Daisy: ‘Mrs Krantz would probably hate to hear it said,’ he wrote, ‘but she gives the impression of having been included late amongst the exclusiveness she so admires. There is nothing wrong with gusto, but when ...”

“... interesting but plausible and even convincing. One, however, is not, an episode known as the Hall-Mills murder case, which unfolded in the newspapers over many months. The double killing of an Episcopal minister and his lover occurred on the night of 14 September 1922, a few days before Fitzgerald and his wife arrived in New York. A social gulf separated the ...”