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“... most of his contemporaries’ ambitions only stretched as far as Isis. Whether his success was more or less surprising given his poor, South London background and short, patchy education is hard to tell. The middle-aged literary grandees who took him up were all university-educated and may have found Barker’s unschooled eloquence refreshingly ...”

“... the Sunday newspaper I had joined as a junior reporter sent me one Saturday afternoon to see Sir Thomas Beecham, then at the height of his fame as a conductor. The paper had written his profile, and I was told to take a proof and show it to him, to ensure that it was factually correct. Clutching the galleys, I rang the bell at his house in St John’s ...”

“... Bering Straits. In the dozen or so years since the death of Geoffrey Elton, the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s prime minister and plenipotentiary, has been similarly airbrushed out of history. Elton, as anyone who did the Tudors for A Levels or read history at Cambridge between 1950 and 1980 knows, made Cromwell the centrepiece of his ...”

“... Spain. The impression of the war which had been left on the public mind in 1961 was that it was a more complicated affair than people had assumed at the time: the picture of a small group of fascists rising, as part of a carefully-organised international conspiracy, against a beleaguered democracy was false; the democracy was ailing and had suffered before ...”

“... whether you’re wearing knickers or mind, as Wittgenstein didn’t, living on porridge; goodness more accessible if you’re what my mother used to call ‘a sluppers’.Nobody explains (or seems to think an explanation required) how this unworldly woman managed to be made a dame by Mrs Thatcher and was laden with honorary degrees; sheer inadvertence ...”

“... Cold War: all the major powers found it handy to have ears there. A French diplomat could learn more about Spain’s next move in Venice than in Madrid. Meanwhile, the regime itself practised communication of another sort, mounting elaborate public ceremonies on land and water to dazzle and awe both locals and ...”

“... that might shatter or fall on us, following the advice of the Civil Protection Department – and, more to the point, the geography teacher. One of the strangest things about being in an earthquake – apart from the feeling of being at the top of a thirty-foot birch tree in a thirty-mile-an-hour wind when you’re actually crouching on the floor of your house ...”

“... Frank Swettenham’ by John Singer Sargent (1904) Augustus John’s T.E. Lawrence is more unsure of himself, and the happiness of his expression suggests a man who liked to be liked. He’s wearing an Arabic head dress, and displayed next to John’s portrait of King Faisal – whose resemblance to Alec Guinness, the man who played him in ...”

“... I ought to have been among other things a good poet,’ Thomas Lovell Beddoes wrote in the postscript to the brief and perfunctory note he left before swallowing a lethal dose of poison. He was 45 years old and had published nothing, save the odd poem, for a quarter of a century. In 1821, as a precocious Oxford undergraduate, he had brought out a volume called The Improvisatore, which was followed in 1822 by a verse drama, The Brides’ Tragedy ...”

“... The legend named Thomas Chatterton is less marvellous than the boy it glorified, and far less rich or strange than the cultural history that includes the history of the legend itself. Chatterton committed suicide in August 1770. He was not yet 18 years old. With little formal education – seven years in a provincial school, followed by less than three years as a lawyer’s apprentice – he left his native Bristol to make his way as a writer in London, where he died only four months later ...”

“... Frances Milton waited until she was 30 before making a good match with a London barrister. Thomas Anthony Trollope had professional prospects and ‘expectations’ of a rich, unmarried and conveniently antique uncle. The dutiful Mrs Trollope had seven children in ten years (only two were to survive into mature age), while her husband contrived to ruin ...”

“... course it is a long book (about 260,000 words by my rough count), and one has the prospect of two more long books (the David Ellis and Mark Kinkead-Weekes ones) looming up awesomely over the first crest: but Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce was a very long book indeed, and it gripped one from start to finish. I think the answer may be, partly, that a biography ...”

“... when I looked away from the screen. I’ve only read one of the sodding things, but that’s more than enough to convince me that ebooks suck. Especially if they’re written by Michael Crichton. Crichton’s previous effort, State of Fear, which is available in Italian and hardback at my local post office, turns on the premise that climate change is a ...”

“... or stop into a chemist for a bar of lemon-scented soap. There are hundreds of history books, some more heavyweight than others, that focus on a single day: as often as not 6 June 1944 or 22 November 1963, though 18 June 1815 is putting in a good showing this year, and there are many not exactly world-famous days in history that have had the ...”

“... or a faith school, or a city academy. It is, however, slightly unusual in being comprehensive in more than just name. Almost a third speak a language other than English at home. Twenty per cent are entitled to free school meals (shorthand for children whose parents receive income support, income-based jobseeker’s allowance, or financial help in accordance ...”