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“... in what it says but in when it was said. 1968 was the year in which it seemed necessary to warn Edward Heath against wandering too eagerly in the direction of Selsdon Park. Here is Blake on tariff reform: It has seldom paid for the Conservative Party to come forward as the party of change. That is not why people vote for it. The Conservatives can accept ...”

“... ignoring the Queen.’ Now the process of reappraisal has been taken a good deal further by Edward Gregg, a graduate originally of the University of Lawrence, Kansas, to whose scholars, and scholarly resources in the shape of the Spencer Research Library, students of English history in the 18th century are already greatly indebted. Dr Gregg sees the ...”

“... or killed during an attack, and £5 for any driven off. Profits could be substantial. When Sir Edward Belcher took some pirate boats in the Sarawak area in 1844, he reported 350 pirates killed and 1000 driven off, and claimed £12,000 from the Admiralty for himself and his crew. In 1849, Brooke took a certain Captain Farquhar looking for pirates, and they ...”

“... barbed wire they are what the world was like Before the War. We take the cards and steam off any Edward VII or George V stamps to use as (pretty mediocre) swaps. Among the picture postcards are photographs on stiffer card: Grandma on outings with the ladies’ bowling club, striding along some promenade in a long, laughing line, big ladies in cloche hats and ...”

“... town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. Both writers, as it happens, are writing about Italy. Both writers use one word three times (‘green’ for Hemingway, ‘primroses’ for Lawrence), and repeat two other words. Hemingway’s passage is ...”

“... lion’, mercury ‘white fume’. The philosopher’s stone was a laboriously produced reddish brown powder, used to promote base metals into precious ones. Even if metals weren’t involved, the aim was still to release power stored in nature so as to produce observable effects. The four elements possessed qualities that could be enhanced or suppressed to ...”

“... houses had been.Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from KensingtonOn​ the opening page of Craig Brown’s One Two Three Four, Brian Epstein and his personal assistant, Alistair Taylor, behold the Beatles for the very first time. It is November 1961, in a ‘dank and damp and smelly’ Liverpool basement, and the young band are loud, foul-mouthed, almost ...”

“... popes and royalty. Several times he is offered, or given, important appointments. In one dream Edward Heath asks him to serve as Ambassador to Scotland; in another he reads in the paper that he has been appointed Archbishop of Westminster. His reaction on both occasions is equivocal. He declines the Scottish appointment, then accepts and goes swimming with ...”

“... that they should remember their birthdays. In Scott of the Antarctic Elspeth Huxley noted that Dr Edward Wilson’s 39th occurred during a side-trip to study the emperor penguins: ‘quite the funniest birthday I have ever spent’. In the novel, when Petty Officer ‘Taff’ Evans mentions his birthday in an attempt at emotional blackmail, Scott dismisses ...”

“... then I’d be naming names. What about signatories to an open letter requesting that Obama pardon Edward Snowden? I spoke on the phone this afternoon to the guy who wrote it. Was the FBI listening? Probably not, but at least the metadata are within reach. Things weren’t always so convenient for the bureau. Writers under Surveillance: The FBI Files ...”

“... we could be thought to have got onto her radar. In February 1989 the shadow chancellor, Gordon Brown, reviewed a collection of essays entitled Thatcherism in a manner that suggested he did not expect her, or her philosophy, to last the pace: ‘When Thatcherism becomes a “wasm”, everyone will wonder what all the fuss was about. Abroad, the term means ...”

“... There are​ self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist – he was studying for a theology degree at Oxford at the time – without knowing whether he was capable of being one, perhaps even without considering absence of talent a potential obstacle ...”

“... colour’ she assigns to the period – 1945-60 – is a foggy sort of greyish brown. Dickens’s monumental fog in Bleak House is perhaps correctly reckoned by Nead to be metaphorical. She doesn’t state what it’s a metaphor for. Presumably the torpid, sclerotic chaos of Chancery. But the impasto fog and smog (a coinage not made till ...”

“... This was not romantic. At Florence they met the Countess of Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward, and Count Alfieri, ‘the Shakespeare of Italy’. In Naples they were welcomed in the highest circles and Katherine found much material for her mocking pen: the royal family ‘cramming like dragons’, the Prince dancing ‘like a cow cantering’, the ...”

“... the longed-for past almost certainly didn’t feel as wonderful at the time as it does in memory. Edward Manners, aesthete and voyeur, the splendidly creepy narrator of Hollinghurst’s second novel, The Folding Star (1994), is infatuated with his 17-year-old pupil, in love largely with the memory of being 17 himself. The Swimming Pool Library is elegiac not ...”