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“... a phrase, a little high culture, but it has eerie undertones if you think about it. The soon-to-be Richard III had a very particular discontent in mind, and he had extreme solutions for it. Right at the end of the movie, a group of children in a classroom rise in turn, each saying, ‘I am Malcolm X,’ and of course this is attractive in terms of the fairy ...”

“... Regiment. His early training drops were, inspiringly, within a few hundred feet of Hard-wick Hall; later, he convalesced at Hare-wood House. Stirling claimed that it was lying in bed under the Adam ceiling in the great Gallery that he determined on a career in architecture. Immediately after the war, he entered the Liverpool School of Architecture. The ...”

“... a group of ill-assorted travelling companions easing reluctantly into conversation in Headlong Hall, he was sure of raising a smile by making the topic on which they eventually settle ‘those various knotty points of meteorology, which usually form the exordium of an English conversation’. By this point in her narrative, however, Harris has her work cut ...”

“... a process recounted in David Alan Grier’s When Computers Were Human. Young physicists like Richard Feynman carved up the calculations into discrete steps, and then assistants – often the young wives of the laboratory’s technical staff – would crunch the numbers, each one performing the same mathematical operation over and over again. One of them ...”

“... agitation, ‘Dead! dead! And never called me mother,’ which remained a popular gag with music-hall comedians well into the 20th century, belongs to a stage version, not the novel). After this cruel blow she falls into a decline, but refrains from revealing herself to her husband until she is at her last gasp: ‘Keep a little corner in your heart for your ...”

“... Copland. The following year her choreography for Oklahoma! revolutionised Broadway. The composer Richard Rodgers had just left his lyricist Lorenz Hart for Oscar Hammerstein II, and the new team realised that the usual dance razzmatazz wasn’t going to be right for a show about cowboys and farmers at the turn of the century. Before Rodeo, de Mille, who was ...”

“... to Hastings. They were violent and sometimes cruel: when peasants in Normandy sent envoys to Duke Richard II to ask for the continuation of their customary rights to wood and water, his response was to send the envoys back without their hands and feet. The practice may have been inherited from Richard’s Viking ...”

“... owned public places (a particularly egregious example is the area in front of London’s City Hall, which is owned by Kuwait’s sovereign wealth fund). In Paris, the left traditionally marches between République and Nation. But the gilets jaunes rejected this système manifestant. They occupied roundabouts, making the case – as with their bright vests ...”

“... that’s hard to imagine.Memories. The children, ours and the Saids’, scampering up and down the hall when we lived in the same building in New York. The piano in the sitting-room, the sense of Brahms in the air, even when there was nothing to be heard. But this sounds a little too peaceful. Edward was a demon tennis player, and I sometimes thought he played ...”

“... a lengthy visual and aural collage, a sort of television series trying to forget about television. Richard Brody describes the result as ‘a kind of working through on screen of the network of associations that formed in Godard’s movie-colonised unconscious’. The key idea here, which appears again and again in French thinking about cinema, is ...”

“... fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with Meriel ...”

“... interesting lines of predilection. Sappho gets in, but not Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists ...”

“... Union, wrote a few articles on economics, inherited the college fellowship of his tutor, Robert Hall, taught (inter alios) the undergraduate Anthony Wedgwood Benn, and entered Parliament in 1950 as MP for South Gloucester. It was a swashbuckling rise by a young man full of glamour. ‘I am more fond and proud of that young man than I can put into ...”

“... of Firbankian tristesse’), but the entire Constant section relies far too heavily on Richard Shead’s excellent critical biography, currently unavailable, issued in 1973 by Simon Publications, London. Motion admits his debt in the Acknowledgements, but virtually nothing we are told hasn’t stemmed from Shead; the narrative sequence is ...”

“... For Eliot, as for many Anglo-Catholics, Andrewes was an iconic ancestor figure. Along with Richard Hooker, George Herbert and William Laud, this ‘right reverend Father in God’ seemed to embody Catholic continuity and spiritual moderation. The English Church, these men believed, had maintained amid all the upheavals of the Protestant reformation a ...”