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“... might seem analogous to an attempt to trace the importance of linguistic philosophy in the life of George VI; but the attempt of a clever person to make bricks without straw is never without interest, particularly since it is the very absence of evidence which Dr Peters finds so suspicious in the first instance. You might have thought that a more interesting ...”

“... the budding Berlin towards Moscow – which Berlin finally reached in 1945/6. But whether Sir George Weidenfeld has had the right idea in resurrecting his despatches, I doubt. No person, no issue is concentrated upon in depth, and the footnotes provide witless and inaccurate help (Desert Victory was not a film about O’Connor’s 1940-41 offensive, and ...”

“... the happiest years of her life, she tells us, were spent with her late husband, ‘Barker’, who was headmaster of The Leys school in Cambridge. Hosking’s family was humble; Trumpington’s grandfather was surgeon general in India and her mother was brought up ‘as a sort of American princess’. And yet the two women share a certain ...”

“... his jousting companions, and constructed a new home for the Order in the elaborate chapel of St George at Windsor. Sir Thomas Malory, who enjoyed the patronage of several Yorkist notables, reflected the temper of the times in his Morte d’Arthur, recounting the conquests and adventures of a youthful Arthur and his knightly followers. Yet Malory’s ...”

“... been at the time (37) and prettier than she probably ever was (more on this later), is copied from George Richmond’s chalk drawing of 1850. Gaskell – the least distinctive of the three – is represented as much by her dress and slightly haughty stance as by her profile. She seems to be looking down at Patrick, though he’s a head taller. Hassall may have ...”

“... wander onto the wrong side of the law, and get in trouble with ‘the Bill’. Indeed, both George Cole and Dennis Waterman in their Minder roles are now thought suitable characters to help encourage young people to stay off drugs in a series of commercials sponsored by the DHSS. The thought of dear old Arthur ending up inside for some of his misdeeds ...”

“... and sentimental to resent and oppose much large-scale tampering with their city’s fabric. As Barker and Hyde put it, ‘London is an architectural mess, but London likes it that way.’ So, perhaps, Rasmussen was right all along: certainly this survey of what was not built corroborates his explanation of what was. We are back where we began, with the ...”

“... is a little-known coda to Chartism, and worthy of further study.) Included, too, is Joseph Barker, another Methodist preacher, and probably the only Chartist to have a steam printing-press in his living-room. Barker was a ‘rational’ Chartist – into phrenology and vegetarianism – whose support for universal ...”

“... gas chromatography and various sorts of microscopy. In 1874, when the collection of Alexander Barker, the son of a fashionable boot-maker, came up for sale at Christie’s, the National Gallery acquired two Botticellis: both long pictures of Venus, one with three putti (An Allegory), the other with four baby satyrs and Mars (Venus and Mars). An Allegory ...”

“... New Apocalypse gets a mention, though none of its poets rates an individual entry unless, like Barker and Watkins, they made it elsewhere on their own. Poetry London, the only magazine to which I ever subscribed without receiving a single copy, is dignified by inclusion, and even gets more space than Horizon, though much less than Scrutiny. I suppose ...”

“... the recent spate of studies – by Michael Kirkham, Stan Smith, and the contributors to Jonathan Barker’s Art of Edward Thomas – seems more fortuitous than co-ordinated. Thomas, as Robert Frost reminded him, ‘knew the worth of [his] bays’. However, it is unwise to die in war when a hegemonic project like Modernism is getting under way. Frost’s ...”

“... he had never been ‘absolutely in the inner circle’ of society; insisted to Harley Granville-Barker that he knew he would never be able to live up to his friend’s high opinion of him; doubted that he would ‘ever be a writer worthy of the name’. The picture that emerges from this latest biography is thus a very different one from that of the ...”

“... occasion and now it’s just a question of attending in Berkeley Square when I imagine Ronnie Barker will hand over the prize. Trusting that a similar scheme was now envisaged by the Bradford Exchange to whose London office in Wembley my three similar missives were to be returned in the event of non-delivery, I opened one cautiously and prepared to set to ...”

“... from California State Polytechnic at Pomona – is, literally, in avocados. Tom has Lloyd George eyebrows, always appears in pressed khaki shorts and is armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of irrigation and tropical agriculture. He could easily pass for one of those planter types who caroused at Raffles and ran vast rubber estates in Malaya or raised ...”

“... This blanket description would cover everything from Chatterton’s fake poems to George MacDonald Fraser’s ‘Flashman’ spoofs without any automatic presumptions of wrong-doing. Carter and Pollard’s unmasking of T. J. Wise with their Enquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets (1934) is often described as an exemplary ...”