“... belong to commuters who do not commute, or those who have escaped their roots and are paying the price for it. The Vale of Aylesbury (A Perfect Execution) and the Medway (In the Kingdom of Air) are viscerally invoked, without recourse to heritage nudges, Dickensian hints. They come over as places known and experienced, rather than merely researched and ...”

“... whose partial, perspectival nature he was thus more likely to spot than, say, a Briton like Richard Hoggart, reared within a working-class milieu which seemed to be wall-to-wall. Hall was pitched between conceptual systems as well as countries, alert to the rough edges of any single doctrinal system, as heterodox in theory as he was hybrid in ...”

“... shy, still standing at the edge of the party. But it was Storey who most powerfully understood the price of the journey, the dissociation, the consequences of leaving home when the scars were still raw, the family illness undiagnosed, to try to become a person. He attempted to hold on to his Yorkshire instincts, but they curdled at the Slade. (Rugby became ...”

“... stood passive and bit his nails.’ But it was Nijinsky and Diaghilev who shared the new vision. Richard Buckle, Nijinsky’s biographer, describes what they were after: Fokine had rebelled against the academic dance, throwing out tutus, turn-out, and virtuosity for its own sake ... Diaghilev foresaw a dead-end to the ballet of local colour and the ...”

“... and make-up probably owed more to stage adaptations of Frankenstein than to the novel itself. Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein, which opened on 28 July 1823, ran for 37 performances in London, with Mr T.P. Cooke a great success in the role of –––, as the play called Frankenstein’s creature. Mary Shelley, who went ...”

“... or encourage smuggling. In the middle of the 18th century, taxes effectively doubled the retail price of tea. Government ‘gaugers’ were sent out across the country to assay stocks held by merchants, to audit their books, and to seize tea smuggled from France, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands into unguarded ports, especially in Scotland and the ...”

“... that ‘this is basically a working-class Barbican, and if it were in EC1 rather than SE28 the price of a flat would be astronomical.’ Hatherley waxes eloquent on its central ‘unbelievably long interconnected block’, praises it for being ‘flood-proof and still architecturally cohesive’, and pours scorn on those ‘hack directors’ – Stanley ...”

“... Protestant art’s survival and continuing use as a didactic and propagandist tool, but at the price of the aesthetic collapse for which traditional art historians have berated it. Koerner’s readings of Cranach’s art are unfailingly arresting and inventive, but perhaps because of rather than despite their brilliance, one sometimes wonders if he ...”

“... hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.’ This is the wording of Richard Pevear’s and Larissa Volokhonsky’s 1990 translation – the translation of the notes is by Edward Wasiolek. In David McDuff’s 1993 version we read: ‘The greater the stupidity, the greater the clarity. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while wit ...”

“... Conservative Caucus – created in the Ford years under the auspices of Jesse Helms and Richard Viguerie – put up $221,054 for its ‘victory over Communism in Southern Africa’. Savimbi was on the organisation’s list of priority concerns. In military terms, the Cubans were doing well in Angola, at a ...”

“... which, to borrow Boswell’s verdict on the aristocratic pretensions of Johnson’s friend Richard Savage, ‘the world must vibrate in a state of uncertainty’). But what of the ‘perpetual confinement’ as Johnson’s caretaker, which she described in her first published book, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson? In her arranged literary marriage ...”

“... you know, their standards are nothing. But they – in the meantime, they can undercut us on price. So it’s very hard on our business.’The Morally Concerned Trump: ‘The other thing with the terrorists is you have to take out their families, when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families. They care about their lives, don’t kid ...”

“... they tend to concentrate on themes and characters rather than techniques or questions of language. Richard Eyre’s film Iris (2001) is well paced, well acted, and offers a moving portrait of Murdoch’s succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease. But there is no sense of the writer in the film. We just get the sprightly young woman, the honoured dame and the person ...”

“... in modern money), though a fancy locket, jewelled setting or ivory case would be extra. The price sounds reasonable, as long as you don’t try to compute the cost per square inch. He produced various formats and sizes, but the classic Hilliard model was a round or oval portrait a couple of inches wide. The diminutiveness, of course, is part of its ...”

“... had to sell in order to keep building – and, once Thatcher’s policies took hold, at a price well below market rates. Renters, unsurprisingly, knew a good deal when they saw it; very quickly, the balance between owners and renters turned around. In 1979, 41 per cent of houses in Milton Keynes were owner-occupied; four years later that figure had ...”