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“... of the Middle Ages, idealised by the Victorians in scenes of ‘Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall’, was in reality abandoned as soon as it was possible to heat and light more rooms. At every level of society it seems there was a desire for increased privacy and households divided, with family, servants, guests of varying degrees of ...”

“... on the bronze plaque on the stern, but only by tilting your head can you make out the faded ‘RICHARD’ below.I now know a good deal about the Bonhomme Richard. I know that it was originally a French merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War ...”

“... parallel when Clinton was told that the architect of his ‘family values’ election campaign, Richard Morris, was about to be exposed in the press as the assiduous client of a call-girl, with whom he had shared White House secrets. It was the worst possible kind of scandal for Clinton, given the past stories of his own extra-marital affairs, now more ...”

“... and an alcove whose wall was thick with black mould. When it was occupied, the patrons used the hall, which was, except for the sink and the hole, indistinguishable from the lavatory. This is one thing I remember about the pub; the other thing I remember is that the pub was called the Jesse James. Someone told me it was named for James because his people ...”

“... Richard Hoggart​ made much in his writings of the scholarship child’s uprootedness and anxiety, but his own dislocation had its limits. Although he went from a primary school in a poor part of Leeds to grammar school and on to university, Hoggart never really made what the novelist Storm Jameson, a generation ahead of him at the University of Leeds, called the ‘journey from the North ...”

“... between old (sentimental) socialism and the new (hard) left. The hero of News from Nowhere, Richard Stern, updates Caute’s earlier hero, middle-aged, middle-of-the-ideological-road Steven Bright, the fortyish academic trapped between two eras whose crack-up was portrayed in The Demonstration (1970) and The Occupation (1971). The formal advantage of ...”

“... little treasure. Good looks don’t hurt but rate low on their own. The teenage girls who fall for Richard Gere Admit his face is random flesh and bone Beside Mel Gibson’s, that his skin lacks tone And when he smiles his pin eyes disappear. They go bananas when he bares his chest But torsos that outstrip his leave them cold. One bit of you might well be the ...”

“... the members of the Commons seem at first sight to be a motley crew. Thus Geoffrey Chaucer and Richard Whittington, for us the two most celebrated individuals recorded in these pages, are now remembered for totally different reasons. They were at least alike in attending only one Parliament, Chaucer as knight of the shire for Kent in 1386 and Whittington ...”

“... appear in texts from the period already carry a whiff of nostalgia. But a new book co-authored by Richard Rastall and Andrew Taylor sheds some light on the ways they worked and lived. Rastall and Taylor begin by explaining what minstrels were (no simple task). The word comes from the Anglo-Norman menestral, which could refer to a travelling musician or ...”

“... Mighty prophets like Gerrard Winstanley (a bankrupt cloth merchant turned cattle herdsman), Sir Richard Bulkeley (an early 18th-century hunchback virtuoso), William Blake (‘I 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 ...”

“... squib. ‘Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king,’ says Richard II, but the problem has always been that Charles is, as it were, pre-anointed, and being The Boss without being The Boss has been the condition of his adult life. His task, in the shadow of his mother, has been to try to preserve himself in a state of ...”

“... Cities that are beautiful, safe and equitable are within our grasp.’ So says Richard Rogers at the end of this reworking of his Reith Lectures of 1995, and we must do our best to believe him. Suppose, however, that the lecturer had pronounced instead on another of the basic building-blocks of society – the family, for instance ...”

“... the virtual extinction of original English music for more than a hundred years’. Richard Luckett will have no truck with cultural snobbery of this sort, even if he fastidiously forgets ‘Hallelujah’ when he writes that in ‘For now is Christ risen’ Christ is ‘named for the first time in Messiah’. His quirky, learned, acerbic book ...”

“... doesn’t tell us to), other, later figures who couldn’t walk in the air, and especially perhaps Richard Drew’s famous photograph, taken at 9.41 a.m. on 11 September 2001, showing a man dropping downwards head first, one leg bent at the knee, only the abstract vertical lines of a building behind him, a construction that in the photograph has neither top ...”

“... whose one-man ‘Ascent of Mont Blanc’ shows attracted standing-room-only crowds at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly for several seasons – published The Physiology of Evening Parties in 1846, and followed it up with a series of ‘natural histories’ of such types as ‘stuck-up people’, ballet girls, idlers on the town, and ‘gents’. The most ...”