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“... change – social nuance not being something you could reasonably expect from a journey on foot in the Dark Ages. Sheltering from the rain in a dilapidated Roman villa, Axl and Beatrice interrupt, and seek to resolve, an argument between an old woman and a ferryman. She accuses him of taking her husband across the water to an island without returning ...”

“... eating. A number of summers ago my friend Eli and I had dinner at a trendy downtown pizza place (John F. Kennedy Jr was at the next table). After we’d finished, and I was halfway out the door, Eli called me back, in a strangely delighted tone of voice, to show me the dead, foot-long sewer rat (grey, oily belly ...”

“... unworthy prostitute,I blush for you.The English throne is sullied,vile bastard, by your foot!Some of this, especially the opera as performed with fervid and overwrought passion by Joan Sutherland as Mary and Huguette Tourangeau as Elizabeth and Pavarotti as Leicester, can take me straight back to my youth. The best music for that, however, is by ...”

“... The relationship between Byron and his editor John Murray lasted a little over ten years. It began in March 1812 with the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, which made Byron’s name. (‘I awoke one morning and found myself famous,’ he famously wrote, or is said to have written.) It ended twice: first, in the winter of 1822, when, after a number of disagreements and misunderstandings, Byron transferred his business to the publisher John Hunt; and finally in the spring of 1824, when Murray presided over the destruction of Byron’s memoirs, which he had not read, in his rooms at 50 Albemarle Street ...”

“... of State for Foreign Affairs. That was fully up to the level of prickliness displayed by John Thadeus Delane, editor of the Times, in his famous exchange with Lord Derby over the accession to power of Napoleon III 28 years earlier, and serves to show that, even if the Standard had allowed its financial independence to be corrupted, it never permitted ...”

“... climate. He recalls one night when the American audience bowed their heads in silence after John Proctor’s execution: the Rosenbergs had simultaneously been executed in Sing Sing. He is both amused and appalled at the film trailer with which a Hollywood film company tries to neutralise Salesman (a cheery succession of businessmen dismissing Willy ...”

“... was put at the bottom of the list when all the great figures such as Bertrand Russell and Michael Foot had gone home: However, for some reason I put the audience in a frenzy. After I had finished and gone home, the audience swarmed out and laid siege to No 10 Downing Street. It was a very satisfactory start to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For the ...”

“... for the average, out-of-shape voyeur. Of course, Hastings does have some professional artists – John Bratby, for instance. When he exhibited locally, some arse-licker left his address and wrote, ‘Wonderful, just like Vincent,’ in the Visitors’ Book. I couldn’t resist adding ‘Price’ in the same writing. In the evenings, there are the pubs – the ...”

“... he incorporates lyrics from Dizzee Rascal, K-Trap and Frank Ocean, as well as quotations from John Boughton’s Municipal Dreams: The Rise and Fall of Council Housing (2018), an essay published by the American Academy of Ophthalmology and a Netflix show about the interior designer Ilse Crawford. His own photographs are interspersed throughout the book. A ...”

“... to do with all their possessions. As for the pictures, which covered almost every available square foot of wall, did they have to be thought of as art simply because they weren’t reproductions? By the time I was wondering about this, I was a teenager, and a willingness to make a detour to the Russell-Cotes instead of just sloping around the shops and cafés ...”

“... and Schutt’s entertaining book covers everything ‘from three-inch fang blennies to thirty-foot prehistoric crocodiles’. The evolution of teeth began in the oceans around half a billion years ago. First, filter-feeding fish evolved jaws – not to eat, but to increase the efficiency of respiration. As their mouths were repurposed to grip onto ...”

“... voters in 1945; or a better comparison might be with the United States in 1960, when the dazzling John F. Kennedy seemed to represent the beginning of a new age after what his supporters saw as the suffocating and mediocre years of President Eisenhower. The under-forties in particular, in Australia in 1972 as in the United States in 1960, suddenly felt ...”

“... study, Unlikely Warriors: The British in the Spanish Civil War and the Struggle against Fascism. John Bassett, who served in the International Brigades for nine months, from March 1938 until they were disbanded that December, articulates the last-great-cause attitude better than anyone: ‘Never again will men of every creed and tongue go to war with the ...”

“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... When John le Carré published A Perfect Spy in 1986, Philip Roth, then spending a lot of time in London, called it ‘the best English novel since the war’. Not being such a fan of A Perfect Spy, I’ve occasionally wondered what Roth’s generous blurb says about the postwar English novel. As a le Carré bore, however, I’ve also wondered how Roth managed to overlook Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974), the central novel in le Carré’s career, in which George Smiley – an outwardly diffident ex-spook with a strenuously unfaithful wife and an interest in 17th-century German literature – comes out of retirement to identify the turncoat in a secret service that’s explicitly presented as a metaphorical ‘vision of the British establishment at play ...”