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“... Designed to keep the hair from obscuring the vision, it was pulled so tight that, as the veteran John Shipp testified, a soldier could scarcely open his eyes. The Tsar’s soldiers had their queues stiffened by iron bars. But the most hated item of equipment was the neckstock, a kind of heavy leather cravat intended to force the soldier’s head erect ...”

“... shows a daredevil riding a high-wheeler, small wheel first, down the steps of the Capitol in Washington. Was there not a Huxley who traversed the Alps on such a mount? (It was not Aldous, that’s for sure.) High-wheelers suffered as much as any kind of bicycle from bad road surfaces, though there were strong men who rode them from Land’s End to ...”

“... love to get it up her and stifle myself between her breasts!’ Here is another Russian, visiting Washington: Surkov thought of the Kennedys. Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met at a party in Los Angeles. A stab of sorrow.     ‘I don’t like this fucking city,’ he growled. ‘It’s all male power. It’s as bad as Moscow.’ He nodded towards an ...”

“... and realpolitik is rightly blamed for prolonging the life and liberty of Barbie, but at least in Washington, unlike Whitehall, there are enough people who realise that democracies die by non-disclosure. The story falls into three distinct phases, and it seems reasonable to assume that Isabel Hilton, who covers Latin America for the Sunday Times, dug round ...”

“... judge from the writing-seminar circuit who had no connection with Guterson were quite slim. Set in Washington State in 1954 on San Piedro, an ‘island of five thousand damp souls’ in the Puget Sound, the novel opens in a small courthouse where a Japanese-American fisherman is on trial for the murder of a white fisherman. We soon learn that the ...”

“... Museum of Modern Art in New York has had a string of such figures, from William Rubin to John Elderfield to Leah Dickerman). Today the more telling split is between modern and contemporary fields (the latter has no exact birthdate – 1970, 1980, 1989), but this is a schism less between the university and the museum than between scholarly curators ...”

“... House; the next night, possibly at the president’s bidding, it was screened for an audience of Washington dignitaries. But not everybody appreciated it. It was immediately attacked by the newly established National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which issued a statement declaring that ‘every resource of a magnificent new art has been ...”

“... Once called ‘the most mysterious manuscript in the world’ by the medievalist and philologist John Manly, its 240 pages contain illustrations of plants no one can identify, what look to be circular celestial maps (though they don’t correspond to any known constellations), drawings of women with rounded bellies frolicking in baths connected by strange ...”

“... managed to get home to Boston in 1787 after eight years’ absence. Davis’s near contemporary John Nicol was a romantic like Spavens: ‘I had read Robinson Crusoe many times over and longed to be at sea.’ He volunteered for the navy at Leith in 1776, as soon as he had finished his apprenticeship as a cooper, eager for the chance to visit China. Jacob ...”

“... in Wheatley’s verse residues of African spiritual practices and memories of her birthplace. John Shields has argued that her elegies are compatible with African animist traditions, and proposes that her background was with the Fula people. Odell said Phillis described her mother pouring water ‘before the sun at his rising’, which has led some to ...”

“... with George Bissell, who had been a professor of Latin and Greek at Dartmouth, a journalist in Washington and an inspector of schools in New Orleans. On his way back to New Hampshire in 1853, Bissell passed through west Pennsylvania, where he encountered the primitive ‘rock oil’ industry, in which oil seepages were sopped up in rags and sold as patent ...”

“... didn’t answer my other questions didn’t make me doubt for one minute he could read my mind. John Gavin who played Sam in Psycho was Reagan’s ambassador to Mexico. Psycho was the first Hollywood film to show a toilet flush. Encopresis is another mental illness I suffered from. It involves farting. The initials of the history student, now a ...”

“... claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was attached to the lyric modernism of ...”

“... Congress barely peeped as costs soared – though there were a few notable holdouts, like Senator John McCain, who called it ‘a scandal and a tragedy’. McCain is a leading representative of a dissident American military tradition that prefers light and agile to massive and lumbering, but it may not be insignificant that his home state, Arizona, is one of ...”

“... is clearly about Vietnam, mapped onto Dark Age Britain. The baddies are Roman bureaucrats (think Washington) and Saxons invading from the north (Ho Chi Minh’s army). The good guys are the British ‘Woads’ (South Vietnamese), protected by the Sarmatians, draftees, slave-soldiers, hoping vainly for a return to freedom and their homes – in other ...”