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“... out as a vaccination centre. Though neither of us knows quite where it is, we realise we must be getting close from the number of eighty-year-olds and carers making their way off the Kentish Town Road, all on the same errand. Rupert isn’t allowed in, and I go fairly briskly through a series of waiting rooms before reaching the vaccination room. It’s ...”

“... July 1853, eighty thousand Russian troops crossed the River Pruth and invaded the Ottoman Empire. By 15 July they had occupied Bucharest, the capital of Ottoman Wallachia, as well as its other major towns. It was an unprovoked attack, justified on spurious grounds: Tsar Nicholas I claimed that more than ten million Orthodox Christians were imperilled ...”

“... homosexuality’. And nobody was more worried than the federal government, which was rumoured to be teeming with gays and lesbians. One might think that Washington’s attentions would have been focused elsewhere – on the Soviet Union, for example, or on Communist spies – but in 1950, President Truman’s advisers warned him that ‘the country is more ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... government would provide accurate information about the pandemic. But public trust soon declined. By the start of June, only half of those polled thought they were being told the truth. News of Dominic Cummings’s lockdown jaunt to Durham had been preceded by a chaotic change of message. (Levido and Guerin were reported to ...”

“... Neil wrote, ‘but if you don’t understand what really makes the Spectator tick then they will be as naught’ (the two had fallen out when Neil jumped ship from Marshall’s right-wing TV channel, GB News). The next day, Marshall visited the Spectator offices – just a few doors down from the offices of UnHerd, an online publication he also owns – and ...”

“... his whims. After seeing Rodin’s The Kiss in 1900, he was determined to have a replica carved by the sculptor himself. It was to be exact in every respect except one. He asked Rodin to provide a full view of the nude man’s genitals. Four years later the piece was completed and delivered to its new owner. But Warren ...”

“... time Baring was the author of some sixty books, and had a collected edition of his works published by Heinemann in the Thirties, he is probably known to most people only through this gloss. Born in 1874, the eighth child of Ned Baring, first Lord Revelstoke and head of the Baring Brothers bank, Maurice had an idyllic childhood, spent mainly at Membland, the ...”

“... letters they sent home to mothers, fathers and brothers, mostly in the Punjab, are anything to go by. Similar letters home, sent by British soldiers to Surrey or Wolverhampton or Newcastle, were, it is true, mostly composed in the same vein: it was considered almost a military duty to sound cheery, and to conceal the real ...”

“... news when they bombed Baghdad. I have been thinking about it because, this morning, I was woken by the sound of a pneumatic drill. When I looked out, there was a film crew on the street, two floors down. And when I switched on the radio they were bombing Yugoslavia, not Belgrade, but somewhere out of sight (though it is hard to tell from the radio). They ...”

“... I’ve been having these bad dreams about David Plante recently. Sometimes, I am slumped on the lavatory, glued there by gin and self-pity; sometimes, I am watching The Sound of Music on television and bawling shameful tears; sometimes, I am driving bad-temperedly through the Tuscan countryside, railing foolishly at the world’s treatment of me ...”

“... Byatt (The Virgin in the Garden) found a slightly earlier epicentre in the Coronation year, 1953. David Lodge’s new novel (How far can you go?) charts Catholic perplexity in the face of the permissive Sixties, Humanae Vitae and the abolition of National Service. Julian Barnes’s very much à la mode Metroland is divided into three sections: I Metroland ...”

“... deference to a lord even after he has been impoverished. But another part of the answer is to be found in the fact that landlords were the beneficiaries of rents from urban as well as agricultural properties, and as towns and industry began to grow, so did some landlords’ incomes. This growth, it is true, was selective – a lucky family here, a ...”

“... a development in the Latin writings of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Once Latin had ceased to be recognisable as a language of the Italian peninsula, it was free to be employed as a transnational medium, available to educated writers regardless of their native speech. It did not matter whether one had been trained in ...”

“... The sculptor​ David Nash has lived and worked in Snowdonia for half a century, and the exhibition of his work currently on view at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff (until 1 September) is a tribute to his time in the region. Born in Surrey in 1945, he moved to the once flourishing slate-mining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog in 1967, the year he left Kingston School of Art ...”