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“... In Cakes and Ale (1930), William Somerset Maugham has Willie Ashenden – his narrator and stand-in – explain that, in reputation-building terms, ‘longevity is genius.’ He comes out with this idea while discussing the case of his friend Edward Driffield, a Hardy-like figure who becomes the Grand Old Man of English Letters after seeing off late Victorian accusations of impropriety ...”

“... evolved slowly: the first professor of geriatric medicine wasn’t appointed until 1965 (William Ferguson Anderson at Glasgow). The treatment of geriatric patients was the subject of intermittent campaigns. In his 1964 study, The Last Refuge, the sociologist Peter Townsend stressed the frequent affronts to dignity and the lack of privacy and basic ...”

“... a chapter to itself in an 1897 book on women’s sweated labour, Robert Harborough Sherard’s White Slaves of England. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Cradley Heath was known as the world’s capital of hand-hammered chain-making, and boasted, somewhat weirdly, that the anchor chain of the Titanic had been manufactured there. It was an ...”

“... less certain than they were when the ships were planned). Their paintwork, with the usual CalMac white superstructure above a black hull, dips in a curve towards the stern, aiming to give an impression of speed, power and modernity. A century ago liners sometimes had an unnecessary third or fourth funnel to achieve the same effect.The Comet was built only a ...”

“... Gardner joined in to say, quite reasonably, that the 1669 version means: ‘why wear this last white garment? It symbolises penitence or virginity, and neither is appropriate.’ Empson’s reply is that her reading is textually ‘impossible’. When another correspondent points out that in the course of his review he misread some of Carew’s ...”

“... take note: tough-guy-hipster-fedora-favourers – Al Capone, Humphrey Bogart, J. Edgar Hoover, William S. Burroughs, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Depp – might all be considered unwitting imitators of Sarah Bernhardt.) 5. The Rampant (er … ) Erotomania. (One moment, Herr Doktor – cough cough – my throat is tickling me.) World famous by her late ...”

“... as a Momentum branch flag and a ‘Women for Corbyn’ banner. The crowd was largely young and white, but there was an older generation too – veterans of the struggle. Behind me a young man who had come with his mother dipped into a Waitrose bag and – perhaps eager to pre-empt the charge of champagne socialism – produced a mini bottle of ...”

“... future citizen of Soviet America’.After twelve issues, two of the young editors, Philip Rahv and William Phillips, appalled by the Moscow show trials of 1936 and 1937, wrested the magazine from party control. The new PR emerged in December 1937. F.W. Dupee, Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy were also on the masthead, as was George L.K. Morris, artist, art ...”

“... moment of bipartisanship: in the 50-year history of the NHS, there hasn’t been another like it. William Beveridge’s 300-page report, Social Insurance and Allied Service, was submitted in November 1942. By the end of 1944, it had sold over 200,000 copies. It had been commissioned with postwar reconstruction in mind and was to lead to one of this ...”

“... from a novel about Shakespeare: ‘“Fye, Will,” said Lucretia, arching backwards and pulling William towards her, “keep thy wit for thy plays, for wit is a poor actor that comes on and plays his part and is heard no more, but the part I would have you play hath more will in it than wit.”’ Has there been a year when such a book would make the Booker ...”

“... lashes out with a shaky version of the truth. She begins by referencing Moses, the children’s white mouse and the patriarch of the nursery cage. She ends by referencing males in general: ‘He sticks that thing of his … into the hole she pees out of … It’s a thing men do, it’s all they want to do, and you won’t like it.’ The phrases hit Aroon ...”

“... servant John Vassall as a Soviet agent and illustrated with a photo of him lying on his bed in white underpants, ‘a spy and homo – a gilt-edged specimen of his type’. This gay-basher’s guide to ‘THE CRAWLER’, ‘THE FUSSY DRESSER’ etc sums up and hopes to activate prejudice, but is perhaps less revealing than the Daily Herald’s ‘What I ...”

“... him get behind phallocentricism to a theoretical realm in which language and desire compose the white noise of libidinised thought. In consequence, his criticism has more purchase than that familiar Freudian writing which, revisionary in a naive sense, reinscribes the theory. When Terry Eagleton, for instance, in his erratic and self-regarding ...”

“... against the dark knights of the state. The difference between Kafka’s view of the state, or William Burroughs’ or even George Orwell’s, and that of James Kelman, is that Kelman believes his fiction offers a more or less literal depiction of how the state operates – it’s not a surreal thing or a symbolic thing or a thing in the mind, for him ...”

“... revenues to create a new Palladian-style Government House in Calcutta, and a college at Fort William where members of the master race could be trained in colonial administration free from contact with any men and women who were not white. Bayly’s interpretation of British imperialism in this period, then, is a stark ...”