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“... of the stranger allies of the missing child’s mother is a self-appointed representative called John Calvin, the moving spirit behind the local Neighbourhood Watch. Borrowing for this character the name of a punitive theologian, who doled out self-satisfaction to the elect and despair to those destined to be damned, isn’t likely to be a novelist’s mark ...”

“... books as prizes in a writing competition. The premises are in Hanover Square up behind the Town Hall and beyond the Infirmary, and, when I was a boy, one of the grander squares in Leeds, where the posh doctors and surgeons from the Brotherton Wing had their consulting-rooms. Nowadays the ring road makes the square difficult to get to and it’s in a bad ...”

“... and statues of the Fonte Gaia, the municipal fountain that originally stood opposite the town hall in Siena. Although neither San Petronio nor the Fonte Gaia reflects much interest in the antique Roman architecture, ornament and figure style that so absorbed leading Florentine sculptors at the time, the tomb chest on which the effigy of Ilaria lies is ...”

“... winning was important to Britten, whether it was a game of cards or the building of a new concert hall, a tennis match or the staging of an opera. Criticism was intolerable to him. Britten had the misfortune to be born with a talent so much greater than that of his competitors that winning came fatally easily. Now this is plain to see. W.H. Auden saw it at ...”

“... of the classical canon on record with the experience of modern performances live in the concert hall to get the point. Without Rosenthal’s performances of Chopin, or Artur Balsam’s Mozart, early Menuhin, the Budapest String Quartet, Klemperer conducting Mahler or Furtwängler conducting Brahms, I think our sense of what ‘aura’ in music might ...”

“... since last year marked the 250th anniversary of his death, he is guaranteed to feature on every hall and church programme. There is also a vast outpouring of Bach recordings, which, until DGG curtailed the series, included John Eliot Gardiner’s amazing cantata performances. One of these took place every week for a year ...”

“... Charles explained; I ‘newar sawe woman soo wyepe’. On their return they had to face Henry. ‘Hall me trost es in you,’ the duke wrote to Wolsey. It had to be, since untangling his rich bride’s finances was ‘past me lerneng’. It’s impossible to say how much of Henry’s anger was for show. He was determined the crown should be the financial ...”

“... began by aborting Constitutional change and is ending in a state of Constitutional rigor mortis. John Major’s Government contemplates no political evolution whatever on the mainland, as distinct from in Ireland, and advertises this rigidity as ‘defence of the Union’. When it founders, however, such intransigence will be overtaken by long overdue ...”

“... brought out of storage after the war, they were reinstated in the north-west corner of the Front Hall, where the present gift shop stands. This was not the end of Amaravati’s vicissitudes. By the Fifties, humidity and pollution had again started to erode the marbles. They were packed away and stored in the museum’s basement in atmospherically controlled ...”

“... really ‘the pre-Christian solar symbol associated with the magic number four’. The feast of John the Baptist was always only that of the summer solstice ‘and of pagan baptism’. Christianity, Camporesi claims, was forced on the countryside by the town, through the vicious ministries of the town’s minions, the Church hierarchy. But the brave ...”

“... with the gloss of apparent spontaneity. Working on this material with them was their producer, John Ammonds, the man who persuaded Morecambe to trust the camera, to play to it with his asides and use it as a mirror for his idiot grin. The other member of the team, their new writer Eddie Braben, was only rarely present. While Hills and Green had entered ...”

“... years, who is spattered with ordure in The Dunciad; ‘stage-struck priests’ like the Rev. John Home, whose Douglas gave rise to a Scottish roar from the pit: ‘Whaur’s yer Wullie Shakespeare noo?’ There is word of parsonical whorings and slayings, of deep draughts in taverns and stews; there are all manner of clerical bruisers, men like the Revds ...”

“... exhibited Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa as well as dwarfs, Eskimos and so on in the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly (which was later to serve as one of London’s first cinemas). Other French paintings, including a version of David’s Coronation of Napoleon, with its dazzling profusion of documentary details, were shown separately in London in the same ...”

“... like Bolivia or Paraguay. De Gaulle said that Chile was ‘the pilot country of Latin America’. John Gunther wrote in 1967 that Chile was ‘one of the most civilised countries in the world’, and that the general line of government was ‘roughly that of the New Deal of Franklin D. Roosevelt or even the British Labour Party’. There is not a hint of such ...”

“... is not a later historian’s conceit. It appears to have been coined by the Whig MP John Hampden, grandson of the hero of resistance to Charles I’s ship money, in testimony to a committee of the House of Lords in the autumn of 1689. Hampden was exulting that, in contrast to the Cromwellian revolution of the 1640s and 1650s which his ancestor ...”