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“... it lies in conscience about poverty – social conscience reinforced by patrician prudence. Paul Barker’s collection of essays shows how eclectic were the founders of the Welfare State. It is scarcely worth disputing the paternity claims between the Asquith government of 1905-1914 and the Attlee government of 1945-1951. War and coalition were also its ...”

“... but secret, open but closed, they can see us but we can’t see them. ¡Olé!On our left is St George Wharf, a sprawling, messy, incoherent sort-of-postmodern residential complex that the readers of Architects’ Journal twice voted Worst Building in the World. Next to it is a building which to my eye looks even worse, The Tower, 1 St ...”

“... he treated them. They all complain about the difficulty or impossibility of getting paid. Clive Barker spells out the most maddening part of it: In the mid-1960s Robert would say to me, ‘I’ll give you that money when I see you.’ But he didn’t realise I needed it that day, to live on. He didn’t understand. It was inconceivable to him that I could ...”

“... promoter. He left the hawking to people like Ezra Pound, ‘that agitated agitator’, ‘official barker outside the tent – or is it a pagoda? – of imagism et al’. In The Tortured Life of Scofield Thayer, James Dempsey makes a persuasive case for placing Thayer at the centre of modernism. He spent much of the 1920s running a magazine that made no ...”

“... billboard announcement of a Victorian melodrama’, or the urgent canvassing of a ‘fairground barker’. As we can see by comparing the actual title-page with the review heading, the typography was a contribution by the Criterion. This is a striking and significant substitution: Eliot used the lower-case j to diminish Jews in ‘Gerontion’, but here ...”

“... which Joan Didion attacked ‘the women’s movement’ in her famous breaking-eggs essay of 1972. George Clinton’s ‘cryptic nonsense’ on that album is neither difficult to hear nor to understand: ‘Mother Earth is pregnant for the third time, for y’all have knocked her up. I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe – I was not ...”

“... thought to have provoked lifelong neurosis about sex. The Companion does not record that George Meredith was instrumental in getting The Story of an African Farm published (poor old Meredith also loses his credit for helping Ouida and Marie Corelli into print). In her later career in England, the Companion portrays Schreiner’s relationships with ...”

“... of Utopian designs. One late 19th-century approach, exemplified by Ruskin in his Guild of St George and by William Morris in his News from Nowhere, sought salvation in a world of rustic, artsy-craftsy, thatched and timbered, anti-machine socialism: ‘small is beautiful’ before its time. Another, more pragmatic coterie, presided over by Ebenezer Howard ...”

“... even necessary for their care. Not that it was eccentric to aim for a career in mad-doctoring – George III’s illness had aroused general curiosity, and appointment to an asylum at least provided board and lodging and a few hundred a year. At the upper end of the profession were the acceptable and gentlemanly doctors who treated the rich; but, without a ...”

“... to Rupert Hart-Davis and his wife is a fitting vote of thanks to the man who (as the letters to George Lyttleton indicate) has encouraged him since the mid-1950s. In future, such labour as this must increasingly be supplied by technology. The ‘bog, clay and rubble, and the stark black dearth’ that Mr Laurence has had to tread is not beneficial for human ...”

“... occurred in a period of theatrical history vividly re-created by Irving Wardle in his biography of George Devine. Devine brought Gielgud to Oxford to direct the OUDS production of Romeo and Juliet in 1932. He had never directed before, though he had played Romeo at the Old Vic. Gielgud has always been interested in stage design; he had at one time considered ...”

“... in the price of fuel could kill many of them off.’Before leaving I had rung a pig farmer, David Barker, whose farm is north of Stowmarket in Suffolk. Barker is 50 years old. His family has been farming pigs in Suffolk for four generations; they have lived and worked on the present farm since 1957. He owns 1250 acres and ...”

“... Click. ‘Dresses for Henrietta Lacks’, an installation by Brisbane-based artist Jill Barker. ‘Dresses made of silver contact paper have been adhered to the windows. Each contains intricate structural patterns, like the DNA and other molecular structures of which we are all composed.’ A picture of a metal dress. In the text, John Gey has ...”

“... individuals, press lords such as Rothermere and Beaverbrook and writers such as Wyndham Lewis and George Bernard Shaw. As late as 1968, the lugubrious Cecil King, Rothermere’s nephew and then boss of the Mirror Group, planned to install Mosley as the head of a military-backed government, with Mountbatten as his second choice. For short-term tactical ...”

“... first birthday there neighbours presented her with what she describes in a letter to Ilse and Kit Barker as her ‘lifelong dream – a toucan’: He has brilliant, electric-blue eyes, grey-blue legs and feet. Most of him is black, except the base of the enormous bill is green and yellow and he has a bright gold bib and bunches of red feathers on his stomach ...”