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“... well and missed the worst of the traffic out of New York City, we will be doing 65 in the middle lane. Even so there’ll be a steady stream of vehicles passing us to left and right, many of them SUVs (sports utility vehicles), the truck-based four-wheel-drive giants that rule America’s roads. Other than the unironic Suburban, a name that has been in ...”

“... brisk writing, with a certain underlying violence.’ The authors of The Bestseller Code (Allen Lane, £20), Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers, are both literary computer people: Archer worked for Penguin, did an English PhD at Stanford and then went to work for Apple; Jockers is the cofounder of Stanford’s ‘Literary Lab’ in Silicon Valley. They have ...”

“... that the winding country roads about which he spoke from the recesses of his memory were now six-lane highways, that the village of Deir Yassin – where Menachem Begin’s Irgun massacred the Palestinian inhabitants in 1948 – was now a mere suburb of Jerusalem, a place of apartment blocks and car repair shops? Was he unaware that the olive groves of which ...”

“... of high status all over the world look out from magnificent portraits, defying all encumbrances. David Cannadine’s study Ornamentalism wittily captures the ways the governors and viceroys of the British Empire vied with Indian rajahs and African kings in their spectacular apparel, all of them arrayed in plumes, festoons and baubles. Something about ...”

“... So no cohabitation between people and animals there. Once I tiptoed up to a hangar across the lane, alerted by the lacerating screams coming from it. Through the sliding door I saw heaps of pigs lying on concrete floors inside pens with steel bars. They were caterwauling like people who had been tortured. It’s no wonder that one of the few workers I ...”

“... and the rise of taxation brought it to an end. Here is nostalgia at the end of the road (sorry, lane), the last fling of the private patron as country-house client and the architect as country-house designer. By this time, of course, the patrons were an unprecedentedly mixed bag, as very few of them were authentic landowners. Reduced rents, diminished acres ...”

“... Sybille Bedford on Aldous Huxley, Michael Holroyd on Augustus John, J.E. Morpurgo on Allen Lane, Ronald Lewin on Slim and Christopher Sykes on Evelyn Waugh. On the other hand, we do get José Harris on Beveridge, James Lees-Milne on Harold Nicolson, O.S. Nock on Stanier, and Hugh Thomas on John Strachey. In such circumstances, where the great have ...”

“... relied on Sheridan’s income as a theatre manager (he bought a controlling interest in the Drury Lane Theatre at the age of 25), and his earnings from the three major plays and one operetta he wrote before his 29th birthday. In 1780 he became an MP for Stafford and, aside from a couple of short periods of government office, remained a leading member of the ...”

“... in the huge, slightly later Buildings of England, a proposal which Pevsner had first put to Allen Lane in the early 1940s. Nevertheless, Pevsner referred to ‘a vague gentleman’s agreement’ with Piper and Betjeman ‘to keep away from each other’s counties for the time being’. In 1951, the first Buildings of England volumes appeared, for ...”

“... two days. Then I bought and read in a similar manner – none took me any longer than two days – David Szalay’s three previous novels: London and the South-East (one of the great mocking titles, up there with Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One, or Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration), The Innocent and Spring. I want to say that here is a ...”

“... on both sides of the Atlantic. Dressed in a carefully chosen series of gowns – by Deirdre David’s report, the wardrobe consisted of black or red velvet for the tragedies, white or pastel satin for the comedies, and dark green or blue brocade for the history plays – and with no props other than a large reading desk, some piled-up books and a pair ...”

“... into walls of curved glass and progressive holes in the ground. The darkened showroom of the Brick Lane monumental mason with the Jewish headstones will be an art gallery. So? The Victorian theatre on Dalston Lane is already a windblown concrete slab with optional water jets propping up a reef of speculative towers nobody ...”

“... is better informed about the fake soldier, ‘Sergeant Farthing’, claiming that his real name is David Jones and that he is a Welshman loosely attached to the London theatre. As for ‘Mr Bartholomew’, the actor says he believes him to be something of a philosopher, with a dissident and free-thinking bias, a certain mathematical or numerological expertise ...”

“... the papers, the name of the ‘donor’ was sometimes rendered Helen Larson and sometimes Helen Lane, in a half-baked attempt by Johns Hopkins to protect patient privacy. It was only with the death of George Gey in 1970 that Henrietta Lacks’s name was published, and it was not until 1973 that the news reached her children that a part of their mother was ...”

“... and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic ...”