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“... Beechcombings is a very different book from Woodlands, and rather suffers from the comparison. Richard Mabey’s intention is to use a series of ‘discursive essays’ to build up ‘a brief history of the narratives we’ve constructed about trees over the past thousand years to make them accessible, useful, comprehensible and obedient’, and to use the ...”

“... in the printing trade. The bulk of the forgeries were manufactured by the eminently respectable Richard Clay and Sons. The firm cannot, over a period of twenty years, have turned out a hundred or so piracies and ‘creative forgeries’ without someone noticing that their work was circulating in the second-hand market under false colours and at hugely ...”

“... other favourite hobby. Guest lists meant something then. The novelist William Styron and his wife, Rose (respected worldwide as a human rights activist), had drawing power as party hosts, the cultural cachet to net composers, playwrights, directors, ratfink fabulists and a former president’s daughter to toast the holidays and air out their egos. Such dos ...”

“... to check) really ended his ‘Ancient Mariner’ with the lines A sadder and later man     I rose the morrow morn, but it would have been wiser of her or him not perversely to butcher Coleridge’s rhythm (‘A sadder and a wiser man’), and the mangling may just be Brett’s work. (A.E. Housman to his publisher Grant Richards with the fifth edition of ...”

“... novelists but who is also a pitiless judge when it comes to evil. But evil is not a category for Richard Cobb. He recognises naughtiness and nastiness, vanity, callousness, lust for blood, but – like a French Impressionist – utter black is not a colour for him. Cobb is most moving and persuasive when he speaks of women and fugitives. ‘A deserter cannot ...”

“... have injected an element of the energy which makes attractive fictional monsters as disparate as Richard III and John Self. Chicago Loop (terrific title) is another book that has a cold, clear surface and a lurking nastiness underneath. Its central character, Parker Jagoda (terrific name), is a 37-year old architect-turned-developer who, unknown to his ...”

“... Her lover rides a hundred miles to see her, and her dull cousin’s fiancé, Gregory Rose, leaves everything to follow her. ‘What makes you all love me so?’ she asks. But Olive, by her own account, had read, at this stage, no other fiction at all. And the African Farm, as it goes on, is a very strange book. Lyndall, in the end, is nursed on ...”

“... come to the boil. His face flushed, his back straightened, and his eyes widened. Then he rose to his feet, and finally he exploded. ‘If this article is published, young man I shall sue your newspaper for one hundred thousand pounds.’ A hundred thousand pounds seemed a lot of money in those days. Controlling my instinct to bolt, I must have ...”

“... of Bowra. But it is the Order of Merit that bulks ever larger, as it does also in Richard Ollard’s biography of A.L. Rowse, A Man of Contradictions. Rowse appears never to have got over the OM awarded to Veronica Wedgwood: ‘ “My OM!” as he grew, with resentful jealousy, accustomed to exclaim.’ Annan, too, scrutinises its recipients ...”

“... in Parliament. All this, it is suggested, created difficulties for his successor and grandson, Richard II, and even laid some of the foundations for the Wars of the Roses. These views have not gone unchallenged. In the 1950s May McKisack wrote a sturdy defence of Edward (rightly praised by Mortimer). Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, in a series of books and ...”

“... James Johnstoun. Caroline editions of the work include a finale composed by the Catholic Irishman, Richard Bellings, who rose to prominence in the Royalist confederation and wrote a history of its affairs. The milieu of Ben Jonson’s friend, William Drummond of Hawthornden, was far from exclusively Scottish. Henry ...”

“... afternoon, we were sitting on a hill, looking down a long, straight road, at the end of which rose the great church of Xanten. The divisional commander, known throughout his command as von Thoma because of the way he emulated his opposite numbers, from his long leather overcoat and his big goggles to his love of destruction, made a sudden appearance. The ...”

“... return on 17 June, with all games to be played without spectators. What the Premier League CEO, Richard Masters, has called ‘the behind closed doors product’ will be a very different viewing experience from the one we’re used to. Computer-generated fans have been mooted. Work is reportedly underway on an app that will make it possible for fans to ...”

“... Stained glass allowed her to make images that looked like collage, a form then very much in vogue: Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi had shown at the Whitechapel in 1956, incorporating pictures of movie stars, images of food packaging, snippets of consumer advertising. Boty made collages without support or encouragement from a tutor: one from 1959 shows a ...”

“... price for a contemporary work when it sold Rothko’s White Centre (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose) for $72.8 million; the following night, at Christie’s, Warhol’s Green Car Crash (Green Burning Car I) went for $71.7 million in a sale that fetched a record total of $384 million. Yves Klein, ‘IKB 93’ (£1.4 million); I was in South Kensington ...”