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“... lives before they would be promoted to tenancy. In the agriculture of the day many tasks were held as suitable for specific age groups. After working at a boy’s task an adolescent would graduate to harder manual labour in another household, and eventually by saving and gaining skills might with maturity graduate to a higher status of farm occupancy or ...”

“... us more about the practical side: about how Jay, Durbin and the others came together, how they held together, and how they gained influence. New ideas will not be enough. Labour will also need historians to help in the search for a better image. This is not just a matter of red roses: the Party will need to rethink what (if anything) it means by ...”

“... II to concede a constitution. ‘Clearly foreshortened and written in haste,’ is the verdict of David McLellan, the editor of the 1998 World’s Classics edition of the Manifesto, to which Attali adds only that he doesn’t see how the authors had time even to reread the thing, never mind rewrite it more carefully. By the time it appeared in mid-February ...”

“... on ‘observation’: ‘In short – without going so far as to say that the same rules held good for the artist as for the natural scientist – he, the cardinal, would be so bold as to suggest to his honoured colleague, del Monte, the dangers of depending too slavishly on the earthly and imperfect in one’s efforts to create beauty.’ Del Monte ...”

“... control over my life. There was a point not long ago when Dave Pelzer’s self-rescue manuals held the top three spots in the bestseller charts. In Britain, it is likely that one out of every 15 adults will have read a Pelzer book, and the ‘inspirational’ style in general, with its page-turning mix of the brutal and the banal, its triteness of phrase ...”

“... sense.’ He also attended the first meeting of the National Assembly of the Scottish Convention, held in Glasgow in March 1947. The argument, as Henderson pressed it in an article for the Voice of Scotland, was that Gaelic civilisation could be defended only by ‘energetic political action which will make life liveable in the glens and along the shores of ...”

“... the death from heatstroke in an Iraq military camp of Private Jason Smith in August 2003 was held – rightly – to be a matter for investigation by the assistant deputy coroner for Oxfordshire, into whose territory the body had been returned. Smith had had to endure shade temperatures in excess of 50ºC without air-conditioning. He had been sick in the ...”

“... an anonymous poem, is said in one surviving manuscript copy to have been delivered at a dinner held by the Lord Mayor during the Christmas festivities that accompanied this visit, by ‘a Scottysh preyst sytting at oon of the syde tablys’. The poem is lavish in its praise of London, the Troy Novant of all cities, its river, its walls, its ...”

“... In​ the early 1960s, David Hockney made a series of etchings inspired by the poems of Constantine Cavafy; he went to Egypt to discover the places Cavafy had drunk coffee and picked up lovers, but in the images it’s mainly Hockney’s own life and friends who figure. The etchings touch on rapture, and the frankness of their erotic pleasure at the sight and memory of boys in bed brought Cavafy to a new, wide readership ...”

“... powers of Ernest Bevin (‘his crowning achievement’, in the words of the new foreign secretary, David Lammy). Apps describes Bevin as ‘the man who would strike the initial spark that started Nato’ and who took the ‘first faltering steps’ towards its creation. But however long you pick over Bevin’s correspondence with George Marshall and Arthur ...”

“... In the painting which shows Wyndham flaubertising in the foreground, the background originally held the figure of the model Jerry Hall breastfeeding her baby. She sat thus for several months, until one day she called in sick. When, a couple of days later, she was still unfit to pose, the enraged Freud painted over her face and inserted that of his ...”

“... Baldwin died’. Philip Roth has been led to histories of American racism by Coates’s books. David Brooks credits him for advancing an ‘education for white people’ that evidently began after ‘Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston and the other killings’. Even USA Today thinks that ‘to have such a voice, in such a moment, is a ray of light.’ Coates ...”

“... Rilke’s Orphic sonnets, indeed to the metamorphic world of Orpheus himself. It held fast to a field of indigenous obsessions, but its effect was not merely to celebrate indigenous ground: it opened that ‘nailed and boarded’ window of the first line in such a way that a sense of loss became a sense of scope, and what might have been a ...”

“... military presence in Nato; John Young’s reassessment of British attitudes to European union; David Reynolds on the sharply different views of the post-1945 strategic pattern held by Attlee and Bevin, and the clash of the British chiefs of staff (already looking on Russia as the new enemy) first with the Foreign Office ...”

“... were dead or in Angolan jails, while South Africa’s military incursions were at least held in check. Various irregulares had hidden themselves here and there, including harried remnants of the Portuguese-armed Unita on the High Plateau, and points east through Bié to the plains of Moxico and the Zambian frontier. But these would be able to ...”