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“... a certain respectability; my personal favourite is Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, in which John Brown’s raid succeeds and a black socialist republic emerges in the South, as prosperous and superior in relation to its shrunken rust-belt northern neighbour as West Germany was to the East in the old days. And there remains the lingering mystery of what ...”

“... client ceased paying.) Yet, as Spear and Goldthwaite mention, in the 1980s an economic historian, John Michael Montias, reset the questions for Holland’s art history when he analysed the 17th-century growth of its picture market in terms of product innovation (new lines of subject matter, whether they be ‘limekilns and taverns’ or banditti) and of ...”

“... to nurse Henry back to health. ‘He had an inexhaustible authority for me,’ he wrote to H.G. Wells on 10 September 1910, ‘and I feel abandoned and afraid, even as a lost child.’ It has often been assumed that the death of William was the strongest incentive for the writing of A Small Boy. Thus in his immensely useful compilation, A Henry James ...”

“... now, with ever increasing speed, the memory traces of market gardens, madhouses, priories, holy wells, 19th-century radicalism, are being wiped out by the new hip, SoHo, loft-living, sofa bar, circus school, art-scam makeover. The Magistrates Court on the north side of Old Street, where the Krays were frequently arraigned, has sunk into torpor; the ...”

“... even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... are occupied. There’s no sign of the superstore, but the promised food outlets are open: Papa John’s Pizza, Burger King and Greggs. One evening I drove down a dark country lane on the edge of Wyberton to the home of Richard Austin, who led the Bypass Independents to victory in 2007. He’s in his eighties now. His wife, Alison, is also involved in local ...”

“... the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible death beyond what we could see there, but lives too, the life of a ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”

“... would have been much more attractive to me with cropped hair and in evening dress’); Wells looking ‘fat, brown and perky’; Chesterton ‘enormous, streaming with sweat, his hair dripping’; Arnold Bennett ‘very pert and looking every inch a cad’; Churchill having the appearance of ‘a drug-taker’. Perhaps there isn’t anything for me ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... proper to “reconstitute” a Jewish state which has not existed for two thousand years,’ H.G. Wells once remarked, ‘why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.’ The modern Palestinians are a people of various ethnic origins, descended from the conquerors of Palestine ...”

“... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...”

“... significant force to his left. In American politics, a respectful Communist Party or an awkward John L. Lewis were marginalia. In Brazil, on the other hand, the PT is a central presence on the national stage. It is often described – even by its enemies – as the only real political party, with a genuine mass membership in the country. There is an element ...”

“... Royal Dutch-Shell, BP-Amoco, TotalFinaElf and Chevron-Texaco), elephantine oil corporations with wells, pipelines, refineries and subsidiaries in almost every country on earth, and collective sales revenues of more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as ...”