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“... Promenade Concerts were founded towards the close of the 19th century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation ...”

“... were probably right, and I was halfway out the door anyway, the living room door, leading to the hall and all it contains. Some of the best poems here are uncharacteristically straightforward, telling little stories or developing a single idea in the vein of ‘Myrtle’ from And the Stars Were Shining (1994), which begins, ‘How funny your name would ...”

“... revival school of Aldo Rossi in Italy – and the New York Five, particularly Peter Eisenman and Richard Meier, with whom they shared an interest in theory. Initially, Jones, together with Jeremy Dixon and Michael Gold, worked for the firm of Frederick Macmanus and Partners, for whom they designed a glassy, Mediterranean block of flats and shops in Clipstone ...”

“... Shakespearean actor Edwin Forrest (1806-72), a man described by his admiring modern biographer Richard Moody as ‘the first actor who refused to subscribe to the nation’s cultural inferiority complex’. As The Shakespeare Riots makes clear, however, Forrest was sufficiently affected by this inferiority complex to have spent much of his life telling the ...”

“... walls still look impressive, even from the bench), but, dissatisfied even with the enormous hall and galleries added by John of Gaunt in the 14th century, he then built what was in effect a whole new Tudor palace within the medieval walls. This entire section of the castle, together with a state-of-the-art garden installed at a speed which would do ...”

“... the Royal Academy of Music, and eventually started playing in a bar, becoming fascinated by Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis. He got a Saturday job to fund his record-buying habit. As he became more involved with what was happening in music, he was aware that the older generation was not amused. ‘People fucking hated it. And no one hated it more than my ...”

“... George of Dwyfor, and then led us off down miles of corridors to a cellar under St Stephen’s Hall where we were finally allowed a drink. The House of Lords is not, to be sure, the only British institution which reduces unsuspecting observers to a state of giggling incredulity. But for unblushing anachronism, it defeats even the Church of England, the ...”

“... disagree when someone pointed out that a year or so ago the idea of this many people sitting in a hall during a heatwave to discuss the Labour Party would have seemed fantastical: I don’t think I’ve ever talked about politics in a way that felt so practical and purposive, so engaged with the world. When the groups came back together and reported their ...”

“... When, separated from its function, music pooled in the stagnant receptacle of the concert hall as entertainment and edification for the middle classes, the gush of productivity slowed. With the exception of Schubert, whose more than six hundred songs and nine symphonies before the age of 31 constituted a (by then) uncommon prolixity, composers wrote ...”

“... but able to accommodate Robert (son of Edwin) Lutyens’s stores for Marks and Spencer as well as Richard Neutra’s blonde American beach houses. Hilaire Belloc, Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, Freya Stark, even Penelope Chetwode (Mrs Betjeman) shared the pages with respected authorities on building materials, the English town (‘one must not be too gay or ...”

“... Henry VII, the first Tudor king, had died aged 52, in his privy chamber at Richmond Palace. But Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley, though rarely straying from the king’s side in his last disease-ridden and paranoid years, had been away from court and nobody had bothered to tell them. More than that: a faction of the late king’s advisers had decided to ...”

“... years her local department store in Bayswater) – is one of several interesting points on which Richard Greene has nothing to say in this disappointingly flat biography. Why she did it she explained herself. It was, like so much in her life and work, the result of a famously (if productively) unhappy childhood. The Sitwells, Edith and her two younger ...”

“... as Charny repeats over and again, every chivalrous man should aim, and whose achievement, as Richard Kaeuper neatly summarises it in his introduction, involved ‘the entire cluster of warrior virtues; great strength, hardiness and skill in using weapons on horseback and on foot, as well as the courage and determination that must inform success in ...”

“... grandest.’ His life-work would be a serial severance of everything that connected him to Marple Hall, his family and his country. When in the 1940s he took out American citizenship, he stripped his name down to ‘Christopher Isherwood’. He would, one imagines, have been even happier with ‘Christopher X’. Englishness is not that easily purged. Even in ...”

“... part of the book explores the plays about English history: the six King Henry plays and two King Richard plays, which relate the origins and course of the Wars of the Roses, and King John. But there are also extensive discussions of the contemporary political pertinence of Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida and even The Merry Wives ...”