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“... jolly healthy girls who don’t even read trash, Auerbach is a lone intellectual devouring Hungry Hill by flashlight. Published in 1943, it’s a saga of feudal decay that opens her American eyes to the possibility of another way of ordering the world. ‘I had always assumed that every generation started life over again in a new beginning; I was stricken by ...”

“... his first year. He attended the zoology lectures given there by E.S. Goodrich, who was (like M.D. Hill, one of his science masters at Eton) a disciple of Edwin Ray Lankester and a believer in natural selection at a time when other modes of evolution seemed to many equally, if not more, persuasive (saltationism, for example, which held evolutionary changes to ...”

“... press, but the press talked about her, and after her scandalous romance with the divorced Captain Peter Townsend they talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By ...”

“... Street nexus were confirmed by the reception of Paul Routledge’s very unauthorised biography of Peter Mandelson, the Labour Member for Hartlepool who would like to be prime minister. Routledge, an Old Labour hack, set out with an apparently impossible ambition – to do a service to the Labour movement by taking on the second most powerful man in the ...”

“... has indeed proved a perfectly good support for settlements of all kinds from fourth-century BC hill towns to 20th-century Californian speculative housing. The tools of planning – zoning, the provision of infrastructure, rules about densities, heights and so on – suggest that the pressures which shape cities can be modelled: but no sooner are buildings ...”

“... of antlers. One of Watt’s best passages is from Joe Orton’s diary for 22 July 1967. Went to Peter Willes for dinner. When we got there he stared at Kenneth in horror. ‘That’s an old Etonian tie!’ he screeched.   ‘Yes,’ Kenneth said, ‘it’s a joke.’   Willes looked staggered ... ‘Well, I’m afraid it’s a joke against you ...”

“... she was mistaken, but not that the biographer of Dickens with ‘no sense of humour whatever’ is Peter Ackroyd or that the German epigraph is by Wilhelm Müller or that Arcadia is a play by Tom Stoppard. Patric Dickinson, Felicity Ashbee and David Cecil are among the dozens of names who pass by unnoted and still more are missing from the index. How ...”

“... eye contact with victims couldn’t be avoided) that still stands above the city on the hill of the Petrisberg. As for the soldiers whom he led with charismatic zest from Britain to the European frontier of modern Turkey, they littered the killing fields of northern Italy and the Balkans, having slaughtered more fellow Romans than had ever fallen ...”

“... of screen comedy, and he points out that the scores for Passport to Pimlico and The Lavender Hill Mob were written by the great French composer Georges Auric, a member with Poulenc and Tailleferre of Jean Cocteau’s Les Six. The Lavender Hill Mob is often seen as a gentle caper comedy, but wrapped up inside this genre ...”

“... the books that fell by the wayside have recently been reissued by the British Library. The Notting Hill Mystery, advertised as ‘the first detective novel’, was published in 1862, six years before The Moonstone, which T.S. Eliot, not altogether correctly, called ‘the first, the longest and the best’ of detective novels. The Female Detective, a ...”

“... yet historically grounded. The visit was greatly enhanced by his friend and travelling companion Peter Beuth, head of the Prussian Department of Trade. Beuth had visited Britain before and wrote to Schinkel from Manchester in 1823 that ‘only here ... the machinery and buildings can be found commensurate with the miracles of modern times – they are called ...”

“... Flora Thompson was born in 1876 in the hamlet of Juniper Hill in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a nursemaid and a stonemason. At the village school she was good at skipping and scripture. She was expected to go into service like most of her schoolfriends, but she was bad at sewing and ineffective with babies; when she was 14 she became a post-office clerk in a nearby village ...”

“... of Sporting Ladies (c. 1770) is typical of many entries from whores’ directories included by Peter Wagner in Eros Revived. Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies, published regularly between 1760 and the early 1790s, prided itself on providing up-to-date information for the sporting gentlemen of London, including full details of starting prices and hot ...”

“... sinew to the state of commercial apotheosis which is awaiting it upon the cinema screen. Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and William Peter Blatty’s Legion (‘The sequel to The Exorcist’) very neatly illustrate this parting of the ways. If Susan Hill’s ‘ghost story’ is not ...”

“... gradually became more formal and more centralised. First the bishops became involved, acting, as Peter Brown puts it in his brilliant study The Cult of the Saints, as ‘spiritual impresarios’. Then it was the turn of the Popes, such as Urban II in the 11th century, Calixtus II in the 12th and Gregory IX in the 13th. As Professor Barlow reminds us in an ...”