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“... soon knew exactly what they wanted to do: no churches, no art galleries, no Doge’s Palace. At a hall off the Campo Santa Margherita they found a hall stuffed with Space Invader machines. There they spent their hours and their money as well. My mild expostulations were met with the explanation that they had large ...”

“... Most days​ I eat my lunch sitting under the statue of Charles James Fox in Bloomsbury Square. There are broad steps on each side of the statue, their Portland stone now stained an aqueous green, and I like to sit beneath and between Fox’s feet, looking, with him, down Bedford Place and towards Russell Square. Like most fat men in statuary (and in life), Fox is seated for greater dignity; he is also swathed in a voluminous toga which drips over the edge of his chair – ‘Charles James Fox unconcerned in a bath towel sits on his arse in Bloomsbury Square,’ was how Louis MacNeice put it in one of his last poems ...”

“... celebrate a civil partnership in the Palace of Westminster, and his latest book tells the story of James Pratt and John Smith, the last men to be executed for sodomy in Britain. Pratt was a servant and Smith a labourer; both were out of work when they were arrested, and only Pratt knew how to write. Pratt was 32 and Smith forty. Pratt was married with a ...”

“... for the queen mother’s 75th birthday, got the queen to open the Maltings, his fine new festival hall, and holidayed with minor European royalty. But he was himself of solidly middle-class origin, the son of a Lowestoft dentist, and often seemed to care very little about social status, just as long as his orderly days allowed for hours of composition and ...”

“... A portrait​ of Henry James hangs in the Strangers’ Dining Room at the Reform Club. The picture was acquired in 2008, and is on the same red wall as portraits of Dickens and Thackeray. James is seated and sunlight falls on the left temple of his semi-bald head – he’s in his late sixties – and he looks up, distracted, as if someone had just entered the room ...”

“... because these are much more familiar to the modern academic than ‘guns and sails’. Bert Hall by contrast plunges straight into the unfamiliar world of Early Modern technology, the ‘black box’ as he calls it, whose inputs and outputs are commonly known to historians but whose inner functions are felt to be of no interest. Historians of technology ...”

“... Thomas Babington Macaulay – later Lord Macaulay, and ‘Tom’ to Catherine Hall – was the most influential of all British historians. Sales of the first two volumes of his great History of England, published in 1848, rivalled those of Scott and Dickens. The main reason for his popularity, apart from his literary style, was that he flattered the English by crediting them with a unique history of evolving ‘freedom ...”

“... Pandava brothers for their queen, Draupadi. Its wide streets and orchards surrounded a palatial hall, built by the demon-architect Maya, which appeared ‘like a mass of new clouds conspicuous in the sky’. The hall was ‘so rich and well built’ that it rivalled the celestial home of Brahma. Its columns and arches ...”

“... see so little of Mr Blake now,’ his wife once complained: ‘He is always in Paradise’), and James Pierrepont Greaves (damned by Carlyle as a ‘blockhead’ and an ‘imbecile’), preferred to leave the world rather than to understand or change it, renouncing (inter alia) religion, property, profit or prostitutes, tobacco, alcohol or flesh (sometimes ...”

“... Cannadine and Cannadine had given us an encouragingly comical puff for his book, Robert Rhodes James reminded us that Lloyd George, despite doing so much to reduce the Upper House to impotence and discredit, had ended his days as Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s ...”

“... The first ‘poems’ by Clive James I can remember seeing were in fact song lyrics written to go with the music of Pete Atkin. I call them ‘poems’ because that’s what Clive wished them to be called. In fact, I’m not sure what they were: highbrow lyrics or lowbrow verse? Set to music, they sounded more or less OK, but ‘on the page’ they seemed sentimental and pretentious – endearing if you happened to like Clive, but almost embarrassingly overanxious to establish that the pop mode could accommodate a finely-educated literary talent ...”

“... The Kelsalls and Davidoff and Hall are worker pairs who have been looking into the family life of a restricted group over a halfcentury or so, using a wide range of the documentation generated by their subjects. Both groups studied were experiencing insecurity. The Scottish families were of landed class, made insecure by sudden changes in politics and in the control and policy of the Church; the English families a century later were of the emerging middle class, busy creating niches in the professions and in the world of manufacturing business ...”

“... Eight years later, by which time her passionate affair with Fullerton was long over, Henry James, in one of his last letters to her, confirmed her first thoughts about the man who had fascinated them both. ‘WMF … is the most inscrutable of men – he will never pose long enough for the Camera of Identification.’ Marion Mainwaring, in Mysteries of ...”

“... a rational consensus about the validity of truth-claims which his earlier writings appear to deny. James: Althusser’s historical materialism, by claiming that all beliefs about the social world are structurally determined, thereby not only relativises itself but makes nonsense of his claim that historical materialism is ...”

“... study?’ KNMU wanted to take on more students, and was allowed to on condition it built an eighth hall of residence. On paper, there is an eighth hall, and student numbers have increased sharply, but the eighth hall was never finished. In 2012, with the government budget under strain ...”