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“... then further fictionalising their situation in The New Machiavelli. The editor of the Spectator, John St Loe Strachey, a pillar of the National Social Purity Crusade (no, really), foamed at the novel’s ‘poisonous and pernicious teaching’, finding it ‘in its essence depraved’ (the book, it should be said, contains no description of sexual activity ...”

“... New York debut in 1918. Thanks to a loan from a benefactor, he arranged a recital in the Aeolian Hall on 20 November, to play a few études and his Second Piano Sonata. The stiff action of the piano bothered him and he became anxious; his hands took a wrong turn and landed in the wrong key. He recovered by rewriting a transition in his head and pounded on ...”

“... Institute of Modern Art – and the magistrates’ court on one side, and the gothic town hall alongside grey 1960s council offices on the other. Completing the square are Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Bottle of Notes, a building-height bottle of lacy blue and white steel, teetering on its side, and a giant TV screen that always seemed to ...”

“... into ‘sixpence’ without any conscious translation. Even a single word could be macaronic: the hall screens appear in one Cambridge record as leskreneum, a French article plus an English (though perhaps French-derived) substantive with a Latin ending. The surviving record of such language mixture is inevitably a written record. We have no evidence of how ...”

“... Johnson’s euphemism for drunk. Getting back after one party, they spent an hour in a heap on the hall floor – ‘Says a lot for the drinks Peter pours.’ On quiet evenings they enjoyed the Benny Hill Show. By the end of their lives Lord and Lady Snow had become a half-comical duo, not at home in a new world (‘the left was going all wrong on the cultural ...”

“... by 1943. If his books now end up in charity shops alongside discarded copies of the F-Plan Diet or John Seymour’s Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, it’s because the shimmering and peaceable ‘England’ he promised is not, after all, to be found waiting at the end of a deserted lane, or, if it were, we’d never know, because we’d be stuck in a traffic ...”

“... days among vague miscellanies of plants. These not only have more to do with Harrods’ Floral Hall than with Central or West Africa but are kept apart from the beasts by artful sheets of plate glass. For all the stage scenery, the actual lebensraum may be not much greater than it was at Polito’s. Some zoos spend huge sums on fibreglass trees with steel ...”

“... Worship: the great Prayer Book Protest of 2000. Today, resistance is likely to come only from John Major’s little old ladies on bicycles, and from the Prayer Book Society – which may well have more members than those lobbies of fuel protesters. It was Cranmer’s intention that what was said in church should be ‘understanded of the people’. The ...”

“... with a gabardine coat he picked up. Unfortunately, he ran into the owner of the coat in a pool hall a few months later, a student who had reported the theft of the coat from Nelson Cleaners and was able to identify a cigarette burn on the hem: the police had their burglar. There are a welter of coincidences and head-to-head encounters in the memoir, Braly ...”

“... Perhaps it is an accident that we turn from the Miró to Kandinsky’s Weisses Kreuz in the hall beyond. With its numbers, symbols and clippings of bright colour, floating in, or hurtling towards, the infinite night, it provides a similarly compelling and disconcerting glimpse of a black world beyond or beneath our own. In any case, moving into the ...”

“... for the wider struggle; she writes approvingly of egalitarian marriages, such as that of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, but is less interested in – perhaps even a little suspicious of – women who were sexually free or who publicly challenged gender roles. She skates over the divisions in the movement, and rather than predict possible ...”

“... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...”

“... textbook, and his admiring biographies of Lord Grey of the Reform Bill, Sir Edward Grey and John Bright. And there was G.M. Young’s masterly if elusive Portrait of an Age. As Briggs gratefully and graciously acknowledges in two of the essays reprinted here, both of these patriarchs influenced him profoundly: Trevelyan by urging the links between ...”

“... supposed. It is to the history of one of the greatest of these cities, London no less, that John Morris addressed himself. Morris was a brilliant, if idiosyncratic scholar, best-known for an ambitious and highly controversial interpretation of the Age of Arthur. Londinium has been published posthumously, like Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne; unlike ...”

“... best-known Committee on Social Thought (established with family money by the economic historian John Nef), are tiny departments cutting across disciplinary specialism and empowered in certain cases to award undergraduate and postgraduate degrees. Hutchins’s Committee on the Liberal Arts was financed from the outside and was used by him to publicise his ...”