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“... back into a state that I thought we should be able to make it pay within a year or two,’ she said at her trial. The labour force was small by local standards (even so, in 1934 the Selwyns employed at least 11 men, including a cook and houseboy, two of them Suk – there were no female servants). Coffee was added to the staple of maize and there were some ...”

“... rooted as they were in a dour nonconformity. I once met the Warton Professor-elect and he said two things that struck me as funny but interestingly contradictory. One was that people had been complaining that his books were getting shorter and shorter – he had recently taken on The Function of Criticism from Addison to the present in a hundred and ...”

“... with the folks back home in Kansas. That is one reason why, as long ago as 1962, W.H. Auden said: ‘When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.’ By these and other measures, the American love affair with science has become even more ardent over recent ...”

“... to worry – I’d pay him special attention so at least one of his evenings would be recorded. He said he had kept a diary himself for a while when young, but it seemed to be heavy in pensées and complaint. It was cool on George’s terrace, four storeys up, looking out over Trastevere. He was quick to refill our drinks. I smoked a cigar. Candace was pretty ...”

“... hospital, which is, I think, what that Celtic-Rangers poem was about, the final joke he made. He said he’d turn blue – the Glasgow Rangers team colour – by the morning. Which he did; he didn’t last the night. That was upsetting for a 13-year-old lad, and then it became much more upsetting in my twenties when I began to think more about him and what ...”

“... in the press as the inventor of ‘zigzag writing’ after a remark in the introductory note by Edward Johnston, a founding father of modern calligraphy. Richardson’s ideas were ‘child-centred’ but she wasn’t a pushover. Pupils who forgot their paintbox were sent to sit in the garden (‘you can go to the devil for all I care’). Hensher loves her ...”

“... Overy quotes Earl De La Warr, the socialist mayor of Bexhill who promoted the pavilion. It was, he said, ‘a venture which is part of a great national movement, virtually to found a new industry – the industry of giving that relaxation, that pleasure, that culture, which hitherto the gloom and dreariness of British resorts have driven our fellow countrymen ...”

“... just as hundreds of simple-lifers at the turn of the last century trekked to Millthorpe to call on Edward Carpenter, whose ‘wholesome’ dinners involved only oatmeal, an egg, some cheese and a little fruit. Carpenter, a romantic socialist and determined breaker of conventions, threw away his dress clothes, wore sandals, lived off his smallholding, sunbathed ...”

“... the M25 and other major roads). We can trust the police to enforce them proportionately, she said. Experience suggests otherwise. When Extinction Rebellion carried out protests in London in October 2019, the Metropolitan Police issued a condition under the POA ordering demonstrators to leave by 9 p.m. They then arrested people who had occupied part of ...”

“... are nowe in an Earthly Paradise, if you have the grace to knowe it,’ William Trumbull said to his son on sending him up in 1622. He was talking about the physical surroundings. Intellectually, the college remained sunk in backwardness and Tory reaction. Brockliss attempts the usual throat-clearing defence against the damning verdict of ...”

“... away too, leaving me, in Alan Partridge’s phrase, clinically fed-up boo-hoo. My wife, having said she would leave, took two and a half years to find a way of doing it – there is a small consolation in not being the only procrastinator in the relationship. While this was going on the LRB commissioned me to write about Richard Hughes, who wrote A High ...”

“... servant or manager; Helen Broderick as the friend who has seen it all before, several times; Edward Everett Horton as the dopey impresario whose every take is a double-take. Horton is missing from Swing Time, soon to be released in a newly restored version by the Criterion Collection, but everyone and everything else is there. Still, I now see all kinds ...”

“... nasty, self-righteous little boys brought a prisoner to him. ‘Here, Arfur. ’E swore!’ they said virtuously. Arfur responded: ‘Ow, pour some water dahn the bugger’s arm.’ That took the wind out of the little prigs’ sails. Even swear-words can be cleanly used. I am emulating Baden-Powell’s anecdotal mode of moral instruction. He followed ...”

“... and Newnham students are still expected to cheer the achievement of Philippa Fawcett, who is said to have stunned the Cambridge establishment in 1890 by coming top of Part One of the Mathematical Tripos (as a woman she could not be given the usual title of Senior Wrangler; so, in an awkward compromise, she was declared to have come ‘above the Senior ...”

“... book could be expected to have the guile to become prime minister. What, then, is there left for Edward Pearce to say? His biography is a handsome and informative study, benefiting from the co-operation of its subject, notably by means of unique access to the diary which Healey kept from the age of 16. Evidently a spare and terse record, this has provided ...”