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“... in the head – writing, it turns out, wasn’t enough. Brissenden was based on the Bay Area poet George Sterling, a friend of London’s who didn’t actually commit suicide until 17 years after Martin Eden was published (he used cyanide). Ruth had a real-life model too, Mabel Applegarth, though the views she expresses seem to be London’s. ‘If I were a ...”

“... rather in the manner that Samuel Johnson, by stubbing his foot against a rock, claimed to refute Berkeley: what was lost as a formal exercise was pure gain as an object lesson. For Crossman remained incorrigibly attached to the habits and training of an academic milieu without ever forgetting that it was as an intellectual in politics that he had a peculiar ...”

“... its intended purpose because we had to keep the windows open to avoid death by poison gas. George McGovern was running for President, Edward Heath was prime minister, and our landlord had yet to discover how to make water hot. Sick dialogue came easy in Norwich. What Ian always had was a great library, an ominous tide of titles that splashed out of ...”

“... transfers are something that politicians are reluctant to talk about, let alone criticise. It was George Osborne’s promise to cut inheritance tax in October 2007 that spooked Gordon Brown into cancelling a general election, triggering the revival of a Conservative opposition that had until then looked completely out of energy and ideas. The centrality of ...”

“... clever ... evidently very much at home among rural phenomena’), grudging about George Eliot (‘Middlemarch is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole ... If we write novels so, how shall we write History?’). He has, however, the highest and most subtle conception of criticism. ‘It is ... the most complicated and the ...”

“... Lincolnshire Poacher’, one of the best-known English folk songs (and a favourite of George IV’s), gives voice to a familiar figure, a canny, twinkly-eyed dissident who strikes out by moonlight for illicit game. ‘’Tis my delight on a shiny night,’ he boasts in the chorus, ‘in the season of the year.’ Since at least the late 19th ...”

“... Detroit, Washington DC, Birmingham, Alabama and the very different California of San Francisco and Berkeley: these are where the key confrontations are said to have happened. When LA gets a mention in histories of the decade, it’s usually for its flowering of pop music, from the pastel melodies of the Beach Boys to the dark anthems of the Doors; or for ...”

“... He was right – but only partly right, there are no absolutes here. What he and William Morris, George Gissing, Ebenezer Howard and a sprawl of anti-urbanists didn’t foresee was a time when that choice would, inconceivably, be in favour of the centripetal. Of course, in a faute de mieux-ish way, the city was always an unwanted lure, a resented necessity ...”

“... the world and masters it.’ Two hundred years later, in rather more sedate circumstances, the Berkeley historian Daniel J. Sargent, addressing the American Historical Association, also evoked the world spirit. But this time it came in the person of Donald Trump and he was riding not on horseback, but on a golf cart. Trump can be compared to ...”

“... explosive-packed sky rockets to be let off in case of any disturbance. At 5 a.m. the bell of St George’s Church, Southwark, began tolling and spectators started to stream silently towards it through the dark and freezing streets. By the time it stopped an hour later, every vantage point around the jail was packed solid. The impending execution had ...”

“... to detect nuclear weapons in the hands of its adversaries as ingenious attempts to disarm what George W. Bush would call ‘evil-doers’. Richelson concludes his book by denying that ‘political leaders, including the president, dictated the content of the [National Intelligence] estimates to provide a “pretext for war” [in Iraq] or to ...”

“... set in motion which, with his energetic assistance, would eventually lead to its abrogation by George W. Bush. In 1966, Teller met Ronald Reagan, then running for the governorship of California, and, once elected, Reagan accepted his invitation to tour the Livermore lab, where Teller and his colleagues told him about plans to build a vast anti-missile ...”

“... gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the ...”

“... inhalations of the nose and drawing it up into his nostrils. He made us read Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé and, preparing me for university entrance, allowed me to smoke in moderation, a discipline I would master no better than European history. After school, I smoked in earnest: large quantities of rolling tobacco, the best of which was Churchman’s Al ...”

“... Allison recalled saying to himself: ‘Still alive, no atmospheric ignition.’ The chemist George Kistiakowsky rushed up to Oppenheimer to remind him of a bet they’d struck on the outcome: ‘Oppie, you owe me ten dollars.’ General Leslie Groves, the overall Director of the Manhattan Project, immediately appreciated the military significance of ...”