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“... been well served by the teachers and librarians who, in Britain and the USA at least, are still major buyers of hard-cover picture books. The mass markets of cheap annuals and paperbacks are another matter – although the huge increase in the number of titles in soft covers, many of which have already had a long life as library books, heartens anyone who ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... save Venice, by protecting it from pollution and installing a new sewage system. Simultaneously, John Sparrow was also turning his attention to the plight of the stricken city. In one of his major letters to the Times, the then Warden of All Souls addressed the urgent question of Venetian dogshit. He noted with regret the ...”

“... Except for two years as a fighter pilot in the RAF, John Colville was Churchill’s Private Secretary throughout the war, and again during his peacetime premiership of 1951-5. Some readers will enjoy his diaries mainly as a portrait of Churchill, whose blazing presence and wealth of eccentricity light up almost every page ...”

“... us that he judged the invasion would result in no harm to him, since, among other factors, two major benefic aspects were in evidence (the scheme’s ascending degree was in a trine aspect of 120° to his natal sun, and the moon in a sextile aspect of 60° to his ascendant). What a comfort it must have been, even if the promised result never eventuated, to ...”

“... to lock on’ (when protesters attach themselves to some immovable object); interfering with major transport works; interfering with ‘key national infrastructure’ – road, rail, airports, harbours, oil refineries and distribution – and printing presses. They also want to give the police the power to stop and search anyone at a protest ‘without ...”

“... life of Civvy Street, when the Kray Twins ruled London – or so the timorous newspapers claimed. John Dickson, a former member of the Krays’ firm, has somehow produced a well-written book, Murder without Conviction. ‘We looked like any normal businessmen in our pin-striped suits,’ he says, describing the firm’s negotiations with the Mafia. The Krays ...”

“... account he gives. One must assume that ‘economic and social history’ means everything from Sir John Clapham and Max Weber to the theory of mental states, the study of working-class culture, anthropology, demography, political sociology and social psychology, urban history, the study of the family, and the history of science and technology. Would Kenyon’s ...”

“... irritated by talk of class conflict, and is not exactly in congratulatory mood when he calls John Carey the most class-conscious critic of the modern age. (The literary hackles raised by Carey’s recent memoir, The Unexpected Professor, which puts the petty-bourgeois boot into patrician dons, revealed just what kind of talk remains unacceptable in a ...”

“... the last twenty years, this negative consensus has been chipped away at by many historians. Yet major barriers to a genuine reassessment of Mary’s Church remain. The greatest of these is the burning of more than 280 Protestant men, women and teenagers between February 1555 and November 1558. This was the most intense religious persecution anywhere in ...”

“... gathered on Blackheath, entering London the next day. Joined by many from the city, they sacked John of Gaunt’s palace of the Savoy and forced the king, the 14-year-old Richard II, to meet them at Mile End. There, on 14 June, Richard made major concessions, the most important being the abolition of villeinage. While ...”

“... capacity of 100 kilotons; at Sellafield, thirty miles further round the coast and the next major employer after Barrow, is a nuclear waste reprocessing plant which has discharged millions of gallons of ‘low-grade’ radioactive waste into the Irish Sea. Just before I went up to Cumbria, the news broke that the area’s notoriously high incidence of ...”

“... hard for you, dealing with these wretches day after day.’ ‘No, it’s easy. I take them to a major eatery. I say, Pooh pooh pooh. I say, Drinky drinky drinky. I tell them their books are doing splendidly in the chains. I tell them readers are flocking to the malls. I say, Coochy coochy coo. I recommend the roast monkfish with savoy cabbage. I tell them ...”

“... ridicule as Molière chose to portray them on the stage. Precious or not, they were in favour of a major spelling reform, as comes out in a brief scene quoted by Cerquiglini from Somaize’s Grand dictionnaire des Précieuses: ‘Roxalie said that they must so go about things as to make it possible to write the same [de mesme in the French, inevitably!] as one ...”

“... a run-of-the-mill effort. They were wrong. The novel went on to win an unprecedented five major prizes in its first year and made the New York Times bestseller list. From a standing start, Patricia Cornwell became a one-woman fiction factory, and a cult. She has produced seven Scarpetta novels since 1990 – a knackering rate of work which she ...”