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“... opening, there were 73 houses, and by 1914 there were 471. Near Harrow I saw a patch of allotments close to the line. There is a property developer lurking inside everyone who has lived in London for a few years, like the Incredible Hulk lurking inside Bruce Banner, and I found myself wondering how much they’d be worth if they were sold for housing. From the ...”

“... or any other playwright.”’ And a similarly recommendable though much briefer introduction, Frank Kermode’s to his Riverside edition, confines itself to an elegant review of the play’s problems, chronological, textual and critical. Kermode calls Hamlet ‘the first great tragedy Europe had produced for two thousand years’, but he declines the ...”

“... Like many ostensibly ancient British rituals, the Promenade Concerts were founded towards the close of the 19th century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation are at least as important as continuity and survival, even though the former are often disguised or mistakenly perceived as the latter ...”

“... the maladroit interference of Harold Watkinson, the Transport Minister, and the intransigence of Frank Cousins, the TGWU leader: it was the first great set-piece battle between a union and the government. Shepherd brings this out well but misses altogether the significance of the strike which stands, as we look back, at the very centre of our recent social ...”

“... repeatedly refers to ‘Lord Victor Rothschild’ in a book published by the ancient firm of Lord Frank Longford) and, finally, given the belief of Anthony Cave Brown that treason is a heritable trait, the Bell Curve theory of clubland skulduggery.Yet this is the standard, both of writing and editing and research. When James Jesus Angleton, crazed and ...”

“... Ern Malley’, written in inspired homage to his newly-discovered hero. The young Sidney Nolan, a close friend of the Reeds, had been fired by Malley’s work and had produced for the cover a dreamy painting that both illustrated and incorporated some of Ern’s most affecting lines from the sequence’s final poem, ‘Petit Testament’: I said to my love ...”

“... about publication at that time (1981) could not but be aware of a militant particularism very close to hand – that of the print unions. They were where all his concerns intersected, and it is quite difficult to see how he could avoid mentioning them. But manage he does. No one can doubt that these unions were desperately abusive. They asserted and ...”

“... when they began an investigation into Robinson’s affairs. This was careless. Robinson had been close to Blair – the Prime Minister and First Lady took their children on holiday to his Tuscan villa – but by December, his loyalties were clearly with Brown. He had been all but finished by successive scandals. As his reputation was shredded, the Brownites ...”

“... influential a recipe’. And although he achieves this, it is almost at the cost of any kind of close reading of the novel itself. In fact, one of the curious things about Svengali’s Web is that Pick seems determined to persuade us that Trilby is not worth reading – except, that is, for the cultural history that a sufficiently informed reader can unpack ...”

“... all Koss’s talent as a herdsman. It is useless to read it unless the reader already has quite a close knowledge of British party-political history, or a general history of the period open at his or her elbow. Koss, as in his first volume about the rise of the Victorian political press, does not provide a narrative of events but only refers to them as he ...”

“... a precedent for Eisenstein’s 1930 fiasco with Dreiser in Erich Von Stroheim’s with McTeague by Frank Norris, made into the ten hours of Greed in 1923 and then cut (by a studio that had merged to become MGM) down to a quarter of its length. Greed was another depiction of American society and morals, and an extravagant work of ‘art!’, and so was bad ...”

“... the Cold War and whatever measures Washington decided were necessary to prosecute it, as well as a frank admirer of American capitalism (having made more cautious moves in this direction under the long editorship of Geoffrey Crowther between 1938 and 1956). In 1965, an article proclaimed the US ‘the most internationally responsible country in the ...”

“... defeated by the union block vote, until he became deputy leader shortly before his death thanks to Frank Cousins, the left-wing leader of the TGWU. His appointment to Attlee’s cabinet after the war can be seen as a concession to the party’s left. As editor of Labour’s house organ, Tribune, Bevan had become the left’s figurehead, and a more effective ...”

“... towards Shoreditch hooted. A distant alarm pulsed. Across a distance which could have been far or close came the tap of a stick, then a few footfalls which died away. That was the very last London fog. Children in Bow had to sleep in their classrooms. Thousands of empty cars were left blocking the North Circular. The Duchess of Kent was unable to reach her ...”

“... by white gravefields containing the remains, among thousands of others, of my great-uncle Frank and Kipling’s son Jack, though who can be sure exactly where they lie? (The identification of Jack’s grave in the cemetery at St Mary’s Advanced Dressing Station is still contested.) Twenty-five years before I went to Loos for the centenary of the ...”