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“... A film clip from the mid-1920s of Josephine Baker dancing, looking as pleased as any extrovert four-year-old to be showing what she can do with her feather skirt and pretty body, is the happiest thing in the V&A Art Deco exhibition. She jokes with you. She has fun.Other good things in the exhibition suggest, as her act does, that the right style can make good times better – whether on a streamlined train, an ocean liner or in a glitzy nightclub ...”

“... On 7 August 1922, in a letter for her husband John Middleton Murry to be opened after her death, Katherine Mansfield wrote: All my manuscripts I leave entirely to you to do what you like with. Go through them one day, dear love, and destroy all you do not use. Please destroy all letters you do not wish to keep and all papers ...”

“... Soviet Union. Earlier, on a visit to Moscow, the British Secretary of State for Education, Kenneth Baker, received from a group of Soviet historians a surprise proposal to organise a joint examination of Soviet history books with English historians, in order to improve the writing of Soviet history after so many years of toeing the Communist Party line. The ...”

“... 150th anniversary, the present guardians of the London Library have chosen an eminent comedian, John Wells, to write their celebratory history. The sage of Chelsea would not have been amused. But then, nothing did amuse him. He seems to have been immune to such essentially human feelings. Carlyle happened to be in the library in 1875 when Bryan Courthope ...”

“... rhythmic intonation is twice interrupted by the girl, once to ask a question (‘but what if the baker won’t let me feel the bread?; you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won’t let near the bread?’) and once in protest – ‘but I don’t sing benna on Sundays at ...”

“... regular Romeo’. But nobody has ever been called ‘a peeping Poirot’. Why is this? Why is Baker Street as universally associated with Conan Doyle’s hero as is Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, or Greyfriars School with Billy Bunter? These are hard questions, and must be put aside in favour of the simple observation that in the bookshops, as the ...”

“... Hondros tell their stories in Reporting Iraq, a gripping little book, put together by Mike Hoyt, John Palattella and their colleagues at the Columbia Journalism Review from hours of interviews with reporters and editors (Melville House, $21.95). Hoyt and Palattella have shaped their material to produce a roughly chronological account of the war in the words ...”

“... work in small magazines that came to be known as fanzines. Despite the early prominence of the Baker Street Irregulars, a Sherlock Holmes society that began producing the Baker Street Journal in 1946, science fiction dominated. There was a spike that coincided with the advent of Star Trek in the 1960s; there are now ...”

“... the result, an overwhelming endorsement of existing ILEA policies, should provide Kenneth Baker with plenty to think about. And for thousands of students there is, as always at this time of year, the pressure of public examinations. This tangled web of issues can be looked at through the prism of literature teaching. Since assessment is the most ...”

“... introduced himself and his two colleagues of the tribunal, Justices William Hoyt of Canada and John Toohey of New South Wales, the last a member of a well-known Catholic family of lawyers, journalists and brewers. All three wore business suits and asked occasional sharp questions. Behind the bench loomed the ninety-odd volumes of Widgery Tribunal ...”

“... and Lawrence Urdang move from one dictionary house to another. Oxford (with R.W. Burchfield and John Sykes) is comparatively stable. When work began on the new Collins, Paul Procter and Della Summers were young conductors under impresario Urdang, and they later moved on to make dictionaries for Longman. Patrick Hanks was recruited to complete the Collins ...”

“... and a couple of tins of beer.’ One remembers the bag of ginger biscuits Hannay bought from a baker’s van in The Thirty-Nine Steps. But mainly it’s a sense of the past that gives this story an extra dimension and makes the Wordsworth quotation sit comfortably in place. It’s true that the main reference back is to more violence, a long-range desert ...”

“... the cover, their faded marbled fronts transformed into a bookish reliquary. This was the material John Middleton Murry mined for the selections he called the Journal and the Scrapbook, though it’s long been known that there was no such distinction. Margaret Scott, who is also co-editor of the five-volume Mansfield Collected Letters, has worked for years on ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as ...”

“... in a sonnet as ‘un positivo padre azafranado’, or ‘an intransigent ginger Jesuit’, as John Dent-Young translates it in his new bilingual Selected Poems. The taint of immorality has long been forgotten, but Góngora’s work has never quite recovered from another accusation: that it is incomprehensible. He was born of a noble family in Córdoba in ...”