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“... But Sand also endorses the hyper-sceptical ‘biblical minimalism’ of Philip Davies, Thomas Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche, which regards such findings as irrelevant since, as they see it, the early history of Israel is actually a fiction that returnees from the Babylonian exile made up after the sixth century BCE. Sand seems unaware of the conflict ...”

“... I was left, at the finish, with a feeling of nostalgia for the psychopathic ‘humour’ of a Jim Thompson or the more exuberant culture spread of Charles Willeford’s Cockfighter. Fate should hurt, it should embrace more than a spoiled romance. The affair at the heart of this novel must be with ‘Alligator’, the stinking pit bull, the sunken mud ...”

“... assume a life of its own and at least for a time to dominate the nation-building process. Edward Thompson insisted that the working class was present at its own birth: it was not only modelled by impersonal forces, he said, it helped to make even its early history. But most workers originated as ex-peasants. In many parts of the world they for long tried to ...”

“... his voice was gone, his throat husky and his powerful frame exhausted. It’s like a scene from Ben Jonson: a fairground world where that ex-boxer swinging his gold belt is a Herculean showman with a voice so powerful it might bring walls crashing down. The charismatic mountebank – or sincere preacher – must draw and play the crowd, amuse it, hector it ...”

“... that arose out of the Korean War. There were one or two Party organisers involved, including Ben Bradley, whom I had known for a long time. He had done a spell of Party work in India, and been one of the defendants in the Meerut Conspiracy Trial. Our Edinburgh section was kept going by a nucleus of supporters, who, for one reason or another, wished to ...”

“... republican institutions in Renaissance England than many critics, and historians, have conceded. Ben Jonson’s Roman interests produced a potentially subversive treatment of republicanism in Sejanus: but he became James I’s court poet, and Paulin deals fairly brusquely with Jonson as a conservative monarchist. He is represented here by ‘To ...”

“... steps out onto the scaffold. 30 March. Obituary of Dudley M. in yesterday’s Independent by Harry Thompson, the biographer of Peter Cook, whose side one might therefore expect him to take. Instead Thompson very much takes Dudley’s line on himself: namely, that he was only brought into Beyond the Fringe as a musical ...”

“... Sydney Opera House is the only 20th-century building that has become a city’s icon – Big Ben, Miss Liberty and the Eiffel Tower date from the 19th – and may well rank with Hagia Sophia and the Taj Mahal as our era’s legacy to the ages. How did an easy-going metropolis, not noted even in Australia for elegance or charm, manage to snare this rare ...”

“... just about every leading social scientist (Titmuss, Townsend, Halsey, Floud), historian (Hobsbawm, Thompson, Hill) or literary intellectual (Wesker, Tynan) in sight. This was what gave the 1964 Labour Government a significance far greater than the 1974-79 Administration. 1964 saw the coming together of the British best and brightest. The failure of Wilsonism ...”

“... life. (The made-up exotic languages in the Tintin books are filled with plays on Marols: Mohammed Ben Kalish Ezab, a comic Arab potentate introduced in Land of Black Gold, gets his name from ‘kalichesap’, liquorice water.) Conquering the Dutch-language market – as Tintin did in the 1940s under the name Kuifje, cognate with ‘quiff’ – was an ...”

“... entertainment, while boasting that Bill Shakespeare had been a regular. (Bricklayer/playwright Ben Jonson of the customised moniker, it’s true, killed a man in these streets and got off by pleading benefit of clergy.) Shoreditch survived as a prophylactic, an interzone protecting the City of London from the liberties of Hoxton, the seething immigrant ...”

“... interests them isn’t the rood loft or the pews carved and dated 1641. They are on the trail of Thompson, the woodworker of Kilburn who always carved a mouse on his handiwork. Some of the pews are his, done in the Forties or Fifties, so somewhere here will be a mouse and they scuffle along the pews looking for it. Rather a silly quest, I ...”

“... figure and would have been more so had she not been kitted out in greasy raincoat, orange skirt, Ben Hogan golfing cap and carpet slippers. She would be going on sixty at this time. She must have prevailed on me to push the van as far as Albany Street, though I recall nothing of the exchange. What I do remember as I trundled the van across Gloucester Bridge ...”

“... had even begun. On 20 August 2014, by which time it was underway, the group sent an email to Ben Dewis, fire safety team leader at the London Fire Brigade.A number of residents of Grenfell Tower are very concerned at the fact that the new improvement works to Grenfell Tower have turned our building into a fire trap. There is only one entry and exit to ...”