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“... fashion, with a few feminist trimmings, is in the same tradition as Ruskin’s ‘The King of the Golden River’ (1850) where his fiercely-held political, aesthetic and ecological doctrines reappear in fantastic guise. In ‘A Toy Princess’ (1877) Mary de Morgan mounts a conventional attack on the conventional Victorian miss; and Frances Browne ...”

“... the case that Walsh enjoys the services of one of the more established literary agents in London, David Higham Associates. The publicity studiously does not mention that Walsh has written other books. The implication is that Knowledge of Angels is a work like Joan Brady’s A Theory of War, which came from nowhere in 1993 to win the Whitbread Prize ...”

“... in the US years before the Penguin school of cookery writers found its greatest star in Elizabeth David in the late Fifties and early Sixties. For these writers, and for Patience Gray, cookery is what the open road was to Cobbett or the natural history of Selbourne to Gilbert White. There is, however, a difference: these are women to whom food is not an end ...”

“... the names of the 1220 men who had sacrificed their lives ‘in response to the call of their King and Country’. At six foot four, Wilson was an imposing figure. In 1886, on imperial service in Burma, he was attacked by local bandits, hostile to colonial rule, with a long, sharp knife used for cutting bamboo. The wound left a permanent scar over his ...”

“... flight to Varennes. Nor should he have been, for Part One was published several months before the king fled and Paine was manhandled. According to Hitchens, Part Two was produced partly to explain to Dr Johnson the need for a written constitution, and partly to endorse Ricardo’s views on commerce and free trade, but when it was written Johnson had been dead ...”

“... on the Rosetta Stone in some way stood for Ptolemy (V); the Greek inscription celebrated the boy-king’s accession and offered him special honours in Egyptian temples on the anniversary of his coronation and his birth. The recumbent lion ? was the fourth sign in the hieroglyphic inscription corresponding to Ptolemaios and the second character in the name ...”

“... but of the services of such invaluable allies as General Galtieri, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and ‘King Arthur’ Scargill? And was there anyone at Tory Central Office so absurdly optimistic as to foresee the hilarious shambles which would be made of itself by the so-called ‘Alliance’? Yet I wonder. Asquith’s long tenure as prime minister also owed much ...”

“... bringing to mind Max Miller’s celebrated appearance with a couple of potatoes – ‘King Edwards!’ – at the Royal Command Variety Performance. The potato became with great speed a staple food throughout Europe. It was greeted with especial enthusiasm in Ireland, where the moist climate is largely unsuited to the growing of wheat, and the ...”

“... like to be Albanian – his own mind-set being one of them. He was born in 1936 in the reign of King Zog – the period of The File on H. He is a poet as well as a novelist, and in Albania he is not just big but a national treasure. People know his poetry by heart. In his early days, he celebrated Hoxha, but then he grew more and more critical of the ...”

“... ceramic tiles. I’ve seen few things as beautiful; you could build a wall in them and outdo a king. Scott must have known that almost nobody would ever see them, but their presence is a bold and lovely fact. There are, too, flourishes built onto the walls, constellations of bricks like the work on the side of a cathedral, up near the top and too high to ...”

“... One. An ignoble plot-engine, you could say, though one that has been deployed by narratives from King Arthur to Star Wars. Freud called it the ‘family romance’. Stylistically, the books sprawl; Rowling’s prose is laden with adverbs and adjectives, and on any one page characters might speak ‘sharply’, ‘curiously’, ‘impatiently’ and ...”

“... the abominable to the merely unsavoury.In the case of Holocaust denial – the crime for which David Irving was sentenced to three years in prison and banned from returning to Austria – the fear of contagion in some countries is based on rational horror instructed by recent experience. That is the argument for making an exception to the belief that the ...”

“... with the two most striking works of the English critic who writes best about the American cinema. David Thomson’s magnificent Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema (1975 – revised edition, 1980) and his lurid Overexposures: The Crisis in American Film-Making (1981) are the work of an intellectual who loves and distrusts films. Throughout Overexposures, he ...”

“... Hendrix noted in his diary after their first, brief meeting. ‘She just knocked me on my ass,’ David Crosby said after hearing her sing ‘Both Sides, Now’. ‘It was the highest quality of songwriting. I liked her better than Dylan.’ Crosby briefly became Mitchell’s inamorato and produced her first album. Leonard Cohen, another influential early ...”

“... to find some amenable sponsors if she is to sustain her bid for freedom. Fortunately, the Wienie King (Robert Dudley), a lugubrious sausage magnate, is on hand to clear the improvident couple of debt; and the journey from New York to Palm Beach yields a multi-purpose Florida meal ticket in the shape of the unimaginably rich John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy ...”