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“... who grew up on it liked its oddness without quite understanding how creepy it was. I mean, Benny Hill? And then we wake up one day, in 2012, and wonder why so many of them turned out to be deviants and weirdos. Our papers explode in outrage and we put on our Crucible expressions before setting off to the graveyard to take down the celebrity graves and break ...”

“... you’re the one trying to hold it together or the one who’s trying to prise the sides apart.Paul Gilroy – one of Hall’s many illustrious former students – suspects it was frustration with New Labour, and what it did to left politics, that led Hall in the 1990s to spend more and more time working on ‘less depressing’ Black Arts projects ...”

“... in the Locked Diary (it is included in the Abinger edition of Forster’s Indian memoir The Hill of Devi). In the ultra-laconic entries for 1924 he records: ‘Aug 19. Had B.S. at 46 Gordon Square. Aug 25. Had R.P. at Ham Spray’ (R.P. is Ralph Partridge, then married to Dora Carrington). What were these ‘havings’, one wonders? It’s a rakish term ...”

“... again. Prats also took Tàpies to the house of a private collector, where he first saw work by Paul Klee. Slowly, courtesy of Prats, he got to know about contemporary art, but this seemed to increase his sense of isolation as well as his desperation to find a way out for himself. ‘Had we lived under normal circumstances,’ he writes, ‘I might have ...”

“... is gone. The big favour she does ask of John is that he build her a dream mansion in Chapel Hill, complete with indoor swimming-pool and matching treehouses for the children, each measuring more than 1000 square feet. This is his ‘cancer gift’ to her, but when it gets built, not only is it a significant drain on the family finances (remember, the ...”

“... of each other to avoid running below privately owned foundations, as at Chancery Lane and Notting Hill Gate. The consequence was the series of sharp curves and gradients which still jolt passengers today but in the early days of the Tube were more extreme, often hurling travellers against each other. Since the City & South London was, uniquely for the era, a ...”

“... from it – but they’ve fallen away from the natural world and been reassigned to human beings. Paul Keegan put this well in a remark about the changing temper of ‘nature writing’ in recent years. ‘The threatening in nature,’ he wrote, ‘has been exchanged for the idea of nature under threat’ (LRB, 20 July 1995). At the same time, Keegan ...”

“... gabled Victorian house. From the high window you could see half of the policeman’s helmet of St Paul’s dome, and further on, a glimpse of Parliament’s spires, and its loyal river selflessly flowing between its crowded banks. At dusk, holding a drink by the window and waiting for Jane to return home, I loved to see the city streetlights arrive in amber ...”

“... view is Tim Lang, who began his radical contemplation of food during the 1970s, when he worked a hill farm in Lancashire. He’s now professor of food policy at City University. It was Lang who showed me Woolton’s map, with its premonition of food miles, a concept he himself developed in the 1990s, and when we met, he took me back to the repeal of the Corn ...”

“... railway age, in the opening of Bleak House, ‘waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill’. Mere ‘foot passengers’ struggle through the rain to their places of employment, adding ‘new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud’. The timid prose of Crossrail copywriters perverts Dickens by remediating his visions through a health and safety ...”

“... compared with what might be expressed in words. I felt this strongly as I stood before the Paul Veronese. I felt assured that more of Man, more of awful and inconceivable intellect, went into the making of that picture than of a thousand poems.John Ruskin’s diary, 8 September 1849Over the past half-century or so, when writers have turned their ...”

“... Wife, Bleasdale’s GBH and Jimmy McGovern’s Hearts and Minds (as well as importing Hill St Blues, ER, Friends and Frasier), but the decision to concentrate on the 16-35 age group led the channel to spurn programmes about quilts in favour of The Girlie Show, a change of direction which was accelerated under Grade’s successor, Michael ...”

“... deny this … The bull made Pasiphac pregnant, deceived by a maple-wood cow. Epimenides and St Paul said that ‘Cretans always lie.’ But Ovid personifies Crete herself as the liar. Crete, open to unnatural sex, expert at covering up, like Pasiphae when she deceives the bull, is the paradigmatic deceptive female. From Hesiod’s Pandora this has been an ...”

“... US Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace, to be chaired by Anita Hill (who brought charges of harassment against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991), is more effective. In the past few months, our understanding of what constitutes sexual harassment has been put under considerable strain. For all the remonstrations ...”

“... a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me, to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured. O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the world of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.’ Five days later, Wilde was ...”