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“... wizard, Dr Schacht, presided over a regime of fiscal conservatism, at least on the surface. Under price controls, forced savings found their outlet in public spending, and devices like the Mefo-Bill helped conceal the costs of the rearmament programme. For it was rearmament which represented the big increase in spending and the crucial stimulus to the ...”

“... Duke of Norfolk existed to make sure that everyone performed their ritual to his satisfaction; no Richard Dimbleby existed to ‘sell’ the royal performances to the public. This would not have been an easy task, for the performers missed their cues, arrived drunk, took the wrong places and, in some cases, giggled throughout the ceremony – George IV’s ...”

“... bark their way ashore through the rushes. That’s how I felt reading the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning and almost universally adored (some reviewers reached for their Tolstoy; others forbade any comparisons at all) Narrow Road to the Deep North: watching tourists hoaxed by polystyrene. It used to be that a novel would put ...”

“... Since I already had an eBay account, I put the CD up for auction on her behalf, with a starting price of £50, a reserve (concealed from prospective buyers) of £750, a brief but enthusiastic blurb (‘EXTREMELY RARE early KEANE CD single’ etc) and an excessive number of high resolution digital photographs of the CD and its packaging. I started the ...”

“... I have always thought of Richard Wollheim as embodying the values and interests of a particularly urbane kind of British intellectual, typified by and possibly originating with the members of the Bloomsbury Circle. It encompasses a serious interest in the arts and especially the art of painting; a dedication to some version of socialist politics; a faith in psychoanalysis as therapy and as a theory of the mind; a commitment to articulate an aesthetic philosophy and in some measure to attempt to live by it; a determination to enhance one’s prose with a certain literary surface; and a profound concern for friendship and the life of the heart ...”

“... for this one. On both Hanley is accompanied by some very nice men. I’d love to meet her mate Richard, first introduced in Estates. At Solihull College they were ‘the much-talked-about, little practised coming together of north Solihull and south Solihull, a clash of the provincial titans to match Adrian Mole and Pandora’, without the romance. In and ...”

“... of a Florentine espresso: minuscule in size; briefly stimulating in effect; and extortionate in price. At £7.50 for 85 pages of text his readers will be shelling out eight pence a page, a tariff which, I couldn’t help but calculate, would have put my own first book in the shops for around £65 a copy. Not for nothing, then, is he renowned as the most ...”

“... the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”

“... Our culture pays a high price for scientific specialisation. As individual researchers have come to know more and more about less and less, so they have increasingly distanced themselves – from one another, from interested amateurs and from the general public. This distancing has created a demand for yet more specialists – professional popularisers such as science journalists, science writers, television producers and presenters, and so forth – whose task it is to mediate between scientists and everybody else ...”

“... the missing face of a corpse, the Soviet monopoly on sable furs, and such ordinary things as the price of beer. It has a Russian kind of poetry – ‘There was a solid, porcelain quality to the sky. It would squeak if you rubbed your thumb on it, Arkady thought’ – as well as an American kind: ‘Schmidt showed a smile as hard as a car grille.’ But we ...”

“... is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’ Chenoune is a French fashion journalist whose book was supported by the ...”

“... You could, for example, sell arms on one side of the world – with luck at a vastly inflated price to people you have little sympathy for – and use the profits to provide paramilitaries on the other side of the world whom you like rather better with free guns. If such behaviour goes against your pacifist sensibilities, you could always use your ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... were both leading lights in that extraordinary cultural renaissance, and they paid an unexpected price for their activities. The rebirth that they championed was also evident elsewhere. Mexico, blessed both with an immense indigenous population and with a revolutionary tradition, had pioneered a similar development years before, as the recent interest in the ...”

“... it should be invoked do indeed purchase liberalism for its proposals, is liberalism bought at the price of arbitrariness? In other words, do the two distinctions on which so much rests – that between the written word and pictorial matter, and that between prohibition and mere restriction – independently recommend themselves as singling out the really ...”