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“... rainfall across the country varied from year to year, because nobody was keeping count. George James Symons, one of those energetic Victorians who combined the erudition of a scholar with the organisational abilities of a manager and the enthusiasm of an amateur collector, realised what was needed and put it in place: a countrywide network of volunteer ...”

“... Gallery, painted around 1620 when he was just out of his teens, with the Metropolitan Museum’s James Stuart, Fourth Duke of Lennox, painted in 1633. The former is a small picture: you look at it close. Threads of white paint highlight the old man’s hair, beard, watering eye and damp lip. Paint and flesh exchange substance. The same is true of a picture ...”

“... of coin shops and Korean grocers, ice cream parlours, language schools and camera shops. James Smith and Sons’ Umbrellas is the only one people remember. The area has never become obsolete, or not quite – there are shifts with changing tastes – but it has remained undefined: a little shabby, a little trashy, bordered by the genteel to the north ...”

“... In a James Bond film, viewer credulity gets its toughest workout with the hero’s tour of, and subsequent escape from, the villain’s lair. This power-crazed evil genius, this smug gentleman in a tightly tailored suit posing as a bold entrepreneur: how was he able to construct a paramilitary base over a dozen square miles in the middle of, say, the United States, without its raising an eyebrow among the local constabulary? How did he get the zeppelin hangar past the county planning board? Such vast amounts of concrete ...”

“... The alternative career fantasies of writers would make an interesting study: James Joyce dreaming of becoming the agent for Irish tweeds in Trieste, Thomas Mann musing that he would have made a good banker, Samuel Beckett contemplating a career as a pilot. ‘I hope I am not too old to take it up seriously nor too stupid about machines to qualify as a commercial pilot,’ Beckett wrote to Thomas MacGreevy at the age of 29, having just published More Pricks than Kicks ...”

“... verities of the prisca theologia, but the divine realities disclosed in Scripture to which the Risen Christ was the only guide. Neither does he yield to the temptation to spiritualise the body, nor to downgrade the importance of the created order. In this, as in all other critical points of doctrine, the Erasmus of this study is undeviatingly ...”

“... and refined in the colonies and on people whose rights and sufferings were not considered to have risen to the level of white ...”

“... and General Workers Union; and Herbert Morrison, the shop assistant straight out of Mr Polly, had risen to influence through local government in London, including the leadership of the London County Council. The later decline in the authority of trade unionists in Parliament was to have serious consequences, but the virtual disappearance of senior figures in ...”

“... Exclusion Crisis of 1679, the attempt to exclude Charles II’s Roman Catholic heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, from the throne. In the political dramas of the 1680s the Russell dynasty produced two of the iconic figures of English Whig mythology: the Whig martyr William, Lord Russell, and one of the Immortal Seven who in 1688 invited William of Orange ...”

“... be faithful to this double vision, and what they can do is quite a bit. The movie is directed by James McTeigue, who was assistant director on the Matrix films. Strange how the Nazis (in these movies and elsewhere) continue to be the readymade reference for evil, as if there were no other candidates, or we couldn’t get our heads round political and moral ...”

“... responsibility, here and elsewhere, today and for ever.’ The film cuts to Mitterrand, who has risen to respond. If he may be permitted to speak from the heights of his experience, he says, Sankara talks with the fine bravery of youth, but his tongue is too sharp and he goes too far. François places an avuncular hand on Thomas’s shoulder. Sankara laughs ...”

“... in a London gallery, there’s more to it than a shared interest in contemporary art, as Henry James explains with just a faint smack of the lips. ‘It wasn’t, in a word, simply that their eyes had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well, and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp deep fact she saw it, in the oddest ...”

“... the household of Mary of Modena, the 15-year-old second wife of the Duke of York (the future James II). She was later transferred to entertain his younger daughter, the emotionally, intellectually and physically challenged Princess Anne. This was hardly a plum position: Anne was third in line to the throne with the likelihood that ...”

“... climate change on this one are as follows. Is it getting warmer? Yes, surface temperatures have risen by 0.8°C from pre-industrial levels. Are humans causing it? Almost certainly. The gases produced by industrialisation and agriculture are known to have an insulating effect, and their concentration in the earth’s atmosphere has increased in line with ...”

“... in throughout Mackenzie’s writing career, many from unexpectedly distinguished sources. Henry James may well have been influenced by Mackenzie’s good looks. He had been so swept away by Rupert Brooke’s appearance that it had been quite a relief to be told he was not a very good poet. But about Mackenzie he was rhapsodic, considering him by far the ...”