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“... He died, in 1928, experimenting on himself with blood donations from an infected patient. Like Wells’s vampiric Martians, Bogdanov’s aliens in Red Star are interested in blood – but only as something to be shared among themselves, in semi-religious ‘comradely exchanges of life’. A scientific amateur and Socialist philosopher, Bogdanov developed a ...”

“... proudly flying its Jolly Roger, is a coffin-sized craft belonging to a researcher called Mike Wells. He has made it his business, despite numerous brushes with security guards and large dogs, to record and report every stage of the recent enclosures. He helped to commission two substantial scientific reports on the actual (rather than the ...”

“... failing as a cotton planter Hunt had struck it rich, making the first of his fortunes from oil wells near the town of El Dorado in Arkansas in the 1920s, before acquiring rights in the just discovered oilfields of East Texas. Among those who followed in his footsteps were the George Bushes, father and son, both of whom bought oil leases in the hope of ...”

“... have also managed to neutralise much of what they show. Buildings like those of Lubetkin or Wells Coates, for instance, were presented as solutions, not creations, and to suggest, as the exhibition must, that other conventions have equal validity undermines the fragile logic that supported their simplicities. A fragment of a Rex Whistler ...”

“... him during his lifetime, although some prescient fellow writers, notably Hugh MacDiarmid and H.G. Wells, had marked him as a major talent. Say ‘Scotland’ and few people (and no travel agents) will think of the bleak, windswept, comparatively featureless North-Eastern coastal region that separates St Andrews from Aberdeen. The Mearns is not a beauty spot ...”

“... is never left unadorned by epithet: ‘the sour-stomached Thomas Carlyle’, ‘the flamboyant John Elliotson’, ‘the one-eyed, gold-waistcoated, civic-skewering Robert Knox’, ‘the humane mad-doctor John Conolly’, ‘the bombastic Ernst Haeckel’. If Desmond gave us time to think about it, one might wonder ...”

“... a fall in consumption. And if prices fall, the relatively low cost of continuing to run existing wells (as opposed to the stupendously high costs of bringing new oilfields on line) means that supply won’t immediately fall far enough to bring prices back up. But both supply and demand can have long-term consequences: oversupply may continue because of the ...”

“... glowing in the vee of the col beneath the cloud-wrack. It is not. Instead we are given bits of John McGahern and John Nash, Neil Gunn and Nan Shepherd and Edward Thomas and Adam Nicolson, and the place itself is disappeared: ‘To my mind the Pools [of Dee] possess a near supernatural presence, recalling the dust-free ...”

“... Cheered on by the Tory faithful, John Major recently dismissed as ‘claptrap’ a letter signed by 500 university teachers of English attacking the proposed revisions to the National Curriculum. The academics were accused – falsely, I believe – of wanting to undermine the teaching of Shakespeare. A few months earlier, the Education Secretary John Patten sent back an official report on English in schools with the comment that 15-year-olds perhaps ought to be made to study the ‘great tradition of the novel ...”

“... Karin Roffman​ ’s superb biography of John Ashbery’s early life concludes with a photograph of the poet striding towards the camera. He is a tallish, handsome young man. The photograph was taken in the autumn of 1955 when he was 28, shortly after he arrived in Montpellier to begin his Fulbright Fellowship. He looks to have the world at his feet ...”

“... Ward’s The Marriage of William Ashe. In 1910 Howards End might have run into Clayhanger, and (Wells again) The History of Mr Polly; perhaps the Antipodean outsider Henry Handel Richardson would have scooped it with The Getting of Wisdom. In 1924 Forster’s publishers might have thought they had a chance with his block-buster, A Passage to India. For ...”

“... though idiosyncratic committee man. When the idea of moving the opera company from Sadler’s Wells to the Coliseum came up it was seriously debated by the Arts Council, of which Coldstream was then vice-chairman. The chairman, Lord Goodman, was all for the move, and as usual he got his way. There were some doubts expressed about the financial prudence of ...”

“... Napoleonic Wars, a patriotic mythology fixated on the achievements of Nelson, Wellington and Sir John Moore at Corunna tends to filter out fear and uncertainty in favour of a seemingly inevitable procession of victories. As Jenny Uglow stresses in her gripping account of Britain during the Napoleonic era, contemporaries had no such feeling of security. There ...”

“... back have sold getting on for $900m worth of tickets. C-3PO and R2-D2 are as well known as Pope John Paul or Mickey Mouse. Lucas’s second movie and first hit, American Graffiti (produced by Francis Coppola, conceived and directed by Lucas), was the most profitable investment in Hollywood history: it brought in $117m against a production cost of ...”

“... and his evidently courteous exchanges with recent custodians of the project (Robert Burchfield, John Simpson, Edmund Weiner) Willinsky detects a quaint mixture of ‘afternoon tea and high-speed computer searches’. His conclusion is friendly, but a little condescending: ‘All told, the OED’s literary, prosaic and omitted citations authorise a ...”