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“... of course, not hers. Eva died in 1977 aged 91, after which the poems more or less stopped coming. Andrew Motion thinks this is no coincidence.Larkin pinpointed 63 as his probable departure date because that was when his father went, turned by his mother into ‘the sort of closed, reserved man who would die of some thing internal’. Sydney Larkin was the ...”

“... necklace of pleasure palaces; the most spectacular being the Trocadero, a 3500-seater designed by George Coles and featuring the largest Wurlitzer organ in Europe. The Elephant was universally acknowledged as ‘the Piccadilly Circus of South London’ and stood at the heart of a satellite belt of 42 active cinemas. Beside the Coronet, now a ‘multi-media ...”

“... a Word.Rejoice! We are ruled thru’ infinityBy this highly dysfunctional Trinity!10 January. In George Lyttelton’s Commonplace Book it’s recorded that Yeats told Peter Warlock that after being invited to hear ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ (a solitary man’s expression of longing for still greater solitude) sung by a thousand Boy Scouts he set up a ...”

“... The tide of modern art wasn’t long in coming: in the first Impressionist salon in 1874, George Braquemond showed an etching of Manet’s Olympia alongside an intriguing version of Rain, Steam and Speed. He captured some of the elements of Turner’s title – the wind-driven rain slashes across the bridge – but his train appears as static as a ...”

“... examination shows it to be more sinister: it is seemingly the house magazine of the Society of St George and dedicated to the preservation of the English identity. A second number comes today, more virulent than the last with columns of correspondence all fervently opposed to the European connection, denouncing Labour (and half the Conservatives) as ...”

“... Restoration. Defoe was born on about 30 September 1660, a few streets from where Milton lived in St Giles Cripplegate. In the course of his career, he often quoted Milton, and though he was careful to criticise the Commonwealth and Protectorate – a necessary journalistic strategy – he emerges in Maximilian Novak’s powerful account of his life and ...”

“... and writers of opposing tastes in delighted admiration, provided they didn’t look too closely.As Andrew Saint​ has observed, among the first colonisers of the no longer distant Surrey hills were the painters Myles Birket Foster and James Hook. They were in the van of an easeled army. Charles O’Brien, the latest editor of the Surrey volume of The ...”

“... the lost age of innocence. Walter Lord, who wrote the 1955 classic A Night to Remember, which, as Andrew Wilson says in his wonderful retellings of survivors’ stories, marks the beginning of the modern era of Titanic myth and memory, sailed on her as a boy. (The Olympic had her share of bad luck too. She was rammed by a warship in 1911 and limped into port ...”

“... alcoholic and sexual derangement, gutter élitism, afternoon clubs at the interface of Soho and St James’s. Out to Lunch is himself the classic double agent, the turned man. He has a public persona as ‘Ben Watson’ (apologist for his nocturnal self, the crazed poet), columnist for the Wire, broadcaster, and author of the monumental and magnificent ...”

“... in Russia was estimated at ten thousand, of whom three thousand were in the capital. (In 1914 the St Petersburg membership had been barely five hundred.) In November 1940, less than four years before it took power in Belgrade, the Yugoslav Communist Party had six thousand members; at its lowest point, in 1932, it had counted barely two hundred. How strong the ...”

“... I asked him to tell me about his family history a glint appeared in Jim’s eye. ‘My grandfather George was born in 1860,’ he said, ‘and he worked as a butcher and a restaurant owner up in London, near St Paul’s. My father was Arch Fordham and he started a farm in Berkshire, but my mother, Elsie, who was born in ...”

“... a hundred endnotes to the final text). By 1932 she’d already got ‘enough powder to blow up St Paul’s’ but went on stoking the fires, adding to her ‘cauldron’ of ideas, as she worked on other projects. It drew heat from her ‘essay-novel’, ‘The Pargiters’, borrowing from its polemical ‘interchapters’ (Woolf eventually dropped them and ...”

“... There were messages of endorsement from Lady Antonia Fraser and the feisty historian Andrew Roberts; the Economist saluted the new edition as ‘impeccably postmodern’; 5000 free copies were distributed to schools, a Trojan horse for early indoctrination in traditional values that would be reinforced by emphatic TV explainers vamping through ...”

“... a giving nature, a Gambian thing.’ She was a Catholic and at one time she sang in the choir of St Francis of Assisi on Treadgold Street, just round the corner from the tower.The tower​ was now completely ablaze. Every floor was on fire apart from a few at the bottom, and yet, here and there at the edges, you could still see individual residents, or ...”

“... Democrats. In Haywire, his steely account of Britain’s backfiring start to the new millennium, Andrew Hindmoor suggests that Cameron’s announcement was intended as a sop to those on the right of his party who were agitating against his plan to introduce gay marriage (when it came to a vote, nearly half the parliamentary party anyhow opposed the bill, and ...”