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“... history. Part of that history can be traced back to the first historian of London to be published. John Stow arranged his pioneering Survey on a topographical system, ward by ward, conducting the reader on a perambulation of the city, providing him with much historical, architectural and biographical information and pausing here and there, as our latterday ...”

“... which has failed the Lawrences – it is life itself. This is the private story. Wing Commander John Lawrence, after his 28 years in the RAF, took early retirement and became an assistant secretary to the MCC, another bastion of tradition. With his turned-up moustache and his near-worship of the Royal Family, he comes over as the archetypal Flying Officer ...”

“... promises of the New Testament – ‘If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will give it’ (John 14) – seemed not to be a promise. Faith might move mountains, but in an invisible mountain range. And I noticed that when people were speaking in tongues, instead of producing a nonsense version of English, they seemed to produce a tourist’s imitation of ...”

“... arms, the right not to pay for health insurance. When representatives from Congress addressed town-hall meetings in the late summer, men in several states came armed with guns in leg holsters. Their local grievance was hostility to Obama’s plan for healthcare, a plan which was detested sight unseen, and which has still not been explained with sufficient ...”

“... 1990s. There is a pink babygro with the slogan ‘I’m a full-time job’ on sale in the entrance hall and Selma James, the feminist writer and activist who helped found the ECP, is being trailed around the building by an old white sheepdog and a young black Labrador. Mary Barton, Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1848 novel about industrial Manchester, begins with the ...”

“... was: that bloodied face, the hero’s grimace, the whole thing like a campaign advert directed by John Ford. In Milwaukee, I bumped into Robert Auth, a member of the New Jersey General Assembly, who began telling me and a Swedish journalist that the Republican Party had always been all about surviving and staying on course. ‘We’re shocked,’ he ...”

“... decades wear on, we see a boom in high culture at the expense of its vulgar relation, the music hall: the rise and rise of the Hazards, in fact, and the fall of the Chances, who are song-and-dance girls. Told by Dora Chance, a marvellously vivacious old ruin who is at her best when she is, as she says, ‘drunk in charge of a narrative’, Wise Children ...”

“... national protest at the stockholding leeches who, he claimed, were sucking the lifeblood from John Bull. At times of economic tension over the following twenty years, the fundholder and the landowner competed to be the most vilified vested interest in the country. But from mid-century, unimagined national prosperity, assisted by Peelite finance, changed ...”

“... in general, that made up his earliest memories of family life. Carpenter then went up to Trinity Hall, Cambridge in 1864, straight to the heart of the Broad Church network, and eventually to a fellowship in that college, newly relinquished by Leslie Stephen. In June 1870, he was ordained by the Bishop of Ely, and got to know F.D. Maurice, Professor of Moral ...”

“... A cased Cassell edition of The Father Brown Stories ... Black Mischief, another old Chapman & Hall first, no dj, but handsome mottled brown boards.’ We may choose to believe Richard Rayner, as he presents himself to us raw: ‘Perhaps we all have this dream, to tell everything and yet not forfeit love – the only sinner not to be roasted.’ What ...”

“... Perelman and Groucho Marx.For my young self, the crucial juncture occurred when, thanks to Annie Hall, Allen became famous in England. Up until 1976 he was an oddity, a little-known Jewish funny man, a minority-interest comedian. With Annie Hall all this changed, and at least for the art-house-inclined, his film became a ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... actually alone. He was accompanied, as always, by his old nanny, Jessie Lightfoot. His lover Eric Hall, who was funding him, visited from time to time, and Bacon sometimes went to London, where his studio still was. The idea that two years in isolation or the sense of hitting bottom can be used to explain a shift in an artist’s work is one way of filling a ...”

“... including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry Howard’s family’s wealth originally came from sugar ...”

“... for the queen mother’s 75th birthday, got the queen to open the Maltings, his fine new festival hall, and holidayed with minor European royalty. But he was himself of solidly middle-class origin, the son of a Lowestoft dentist, and often seemed to care very little about social status, just as long as his orderly days allowed for hours of composition and ...”