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“... to bring it up to the average among similar countries. Over the course of the 2010s that share rose in most countries, but in the UK it fell. In particular, the share of GDP spent on investment in healthcare (new hospitals, new beds etc), which in 2010 was around the average among ‘peer’ countries ...”

“... Revolution – the Terror and the Napoleonic conquests – was wearing off. In July 1830 Paris rose, expelling the Bourbon dynasty. Revolution became terrifyingly contagious: Belgium rebelled and won its independence; violent protest broke out in parts of Italy and Switzerland, and in November the Poles launched a huge but vain insurrection against the ...”

“... belief, encouraged by meetings in the United States with anthropological writers such as Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, was that the outer world of familial and social patterns was as important for each individual as the inner world, that the intersection of the two was the crux of character. Hence his writings on Native American child-rearing, on ...”

“... Corelli and Ethel M. Dell, but not Glyn. Two thick Companions to Literature, one of them edited by Margaret Drabble, give her 13 lines between them. Chambers Biographical Dictionary snortingly dismisses the Glyn output as ‘nonsensical, high-falutin, faulty in construction and ungrammatical’, qualities which were never a bar to popular ...”

“... in public – as once at a royal levee, resplendent ‘in a suit of imperial blue, lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons’. What energy he had, what persistence, what lapses and arrests. By the end of his tumultuous life he had at least become the grey eminence saluted in the title conferred on the last of the ...”

“... pieces of naughtiness and in Craig Raine’s image of an excited watering-can and a peculiar rose – and this is because, more than anything, the blue verse tradition is about being in control – of your verse-form as well as your feelings. There is no room in this tradition for a poem about sexual compulsion such as Ted Hughes’s ‘A Childish ...”

“... which Pound, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore (and, slightly earlier, Gertrude Stein) rose up, angry and ready to do battle with mediocrity. Carr describes a pretty mediocre Philadelphia a hundred years ago, ‘pink and drab’ and hidebound. H.D. found it disconcerting after a bucolic childhood in the Moravian town of Bethlehem, further north ...”

“... his liberal sympathies and a tendency to blurt out information about church assets. But he slowly rose through the ranks to become precentor, and spent his dotage working on the cathedral’s medieval manuscripts.In the course of his research, Bannister struck up a correspondence with Montague Rhodes James. Though he is now more famous for his ghost ...”

“... textured with gold, set off against deep blues and greens. In the third painting in the Briar Rose series (1885-90) – a rendering of the Sleeping Beauty tale – the princess’s comatose maids (mostly their feet) are hazily reflected in a shimmering golden floor. (Burne-Jones was good at reflections – reflections of reflections of reflections of ...”

“... neglect but from a major head injury: someone has assaulted him.It is 1985, two years after Margaret Thatcher’s second election victory, the beginning of the end of the welfare state in which Lou, like so many in the postwar country, had invested her dreams. Perhaps, EastEnders suggests, this might be the real reason things are going ...”

“... Now, however, earlier feminist explorations are being rediscovered in the late stories of Margaret Oliphant and the novels of Willa Muir and Catherine Carswell. Young women writers are finding that they have a Scottish tradition behind them as well as imaginative and ideological links to work from elsewhere. Yet at least as striking is the way in ...”

“... agent who came across it by chance in a charity shop. The new edition arrives with tributes from Margaret Atwood, Eimear McBride and Claire-Louise Bennett, among others, who emphasise Dick’s status as a ‘trailblazing queer English writer’. Have other novelists been influenced by her? I prefer to think of They as inimitable: innovative in structure but ...”

“... more interesting phenomenon, but is the wording of her dedications interesting or original? ‘To Margaret Rutherford, in admiration’: I share the admiration for Margaret Rutherford, but not the admiration for this as a dedication. There can be no intrinsic objection to such a dedication as Thomas Moore’s, of Lalla ...”

“... Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the early 1980s – Tony Banks, Margaret Beckett, Jeremy Corbyn, Michael Meacher, Clare Short, Gavin Strang – have been given only walk-on roles in the Cabinet, while younger recruits to Benn’s Campaign Group, such as Paul Boateng and Dawn Primarolo, have not been allowed to speak in their ...”

“... search for the young woman who would play Scarlett O’Hara. The move provoked a furore; Margaret Mitchell’s novel, published in 1936, was already a national bestseller – it seemed that everyone was reading it – and the desire to star in the movie version proved irresistible. As in a proto-Pop Idol, lines of would-be Scarletts queued up for ...”