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“... Harold Bloom on the influence of Marlowe, Peter Conrad on Shakespeare and Romantic opera, Michael Bristol on the ‘culture wars’) without thinking very hard about either their implications or their compatibility. (It’s manifestly counter-productive, for example, to conclude an engagingly fervent book about the unique irreplaceability of ...”

“... from the wings in the most recent example of what might be termed American cultural materialism, Michael Bristol’s fascinating Shakespeare’s America, America’s Shakespeare. Taylor’s nationality, his co-editorship of the Oxford Shakespeare, to say nothing of his capacity for discovering ‘new’ poems by the Bard (the best-forgotten ‘Shall I ...”

“... at 40 Grosvenor Road, Westminster, next door to Sidney and Beatrice Webb. With his elder brother Michael, Anthony went to the local school (Westminster), and he grew up thinking that he might work locally too, just like his dad. Lady Stansgate gives another insight on the boys’ upbringing: ‘They used to pretend they were workmen called Bill and Jim ...”

“... had been retained following the post-mortem occasioned by her death after cardiac surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary. In March 1996, Mrs Rickard watched a television programme about paediatric cardiac surgery in Bristol, which led her to ask the hospital for her daughter’s medical records. On learning from them that ...”

“... with the Committee. Like every other commentator Mr Carswell judges Morris, the Vice-Chancellor of Bristol, to have been the most powerful member of the group. His summary of Morris’s attitude and position could not be bettered. ‘For the Robbins Committee to succeed,’ he writes, it had to deliver a report with which the universities would co-operate, as ...”

“... and assesses the value of Shakespeare in the re-education of prisoners. In an enlightening essay, Michael Bristol recounts some of the things students said to him about Isabella, including the kid who argued, invoking Aristotle on continence, that ‘unwanted sex is not a trivial consideration.’ Chastity, in this view, means upholding ‘a standard of ...”

“... and forgery. Chatterton not only invented the character and work of Thomas Rowley, supposedly a Bristol monk, but also carefully presented it in faded ink on artificially aged parchment, strangely intent on fooling connoisseurs of medieval literature such as Horace Walpole, author of the earliest Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, and publishers such as ...”

“... rabbits, weasels and so on; and as a first step have been watching videos and nature films. Michael Bryant, who plays Badger, is sceptical about this, as older actors tend to be. However, Jane Gibson, who is teaching them movement, thinks she has made a breakthrough when Michael asks if he can take away the videos and ...”

“... the Second World War. He got lecturing jobs at Newcastle and Reading; then chairs at Manchester, Bristol, London and Cambridge. Never one to miss an irony against himself, he remembers the double meaning lurking in the word ‘professor’: ‘what you have principally done to earn a living has been to teach, or profess to.’ He doesn’t think he was a ...”

“... do with it can’t always be predicted, as last year’s toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol showed. But, by any measure, the degree of attention recently given to topics once seen as peripheral to British history is impressive. According to the Royal Historical Society’s Bibliography of British and Irish History, since 2007 more has been ...”

“... In this series Paul Theroux takes the London Transport Number 19 from his house down to the shops. Michael Frayn goes on a sight-seeing tour round Sheffield, and Michael Palin pays five quid to go to India on an old Leeds Corporation double-decker. And I, in a bus-ride down memory motorway, take the number 006 National Coach ...”

“... Ireland, although free trade with Ireland was scarcely a cause calculated to endear him to the Bristol merchants who had elected him to Parliament. Nor was his support of the American colonists, which made him so unpopular in Bristol that he told his constituents in August 1776, ‘in this temper of yours and of my ...”

“... On 10 September 1949 Michael Perrin, one of the heads of the British Atomic Energy Programme, was woken up by an urgent telephone call asking him to come to the communications room at the US Embassy in London. There his opposite number in the Pentagon asked that an RAF plane be sent to the upper atmosphere to check radioactivity detected by the US Air Force that appeared to signal a Soviet atomic explosion ...”

“... Readers making their way through Michael Bracewell’s latest novel may gradually become aware of a small but persistent ache: it comes of the author nudging them in the ribs. There is no chance of being caught napping during the various crises and cruces of The Conclave because Bracewell signposts them all with a diligence and clarity that would not disgrace a sightseeing guide ...”

“... of my 21st birthday. The guests included Norman Cameron and Tom Driberg, now both dead, and ‘Michael Innes’, still alive. We had dinner in a private room at the George restaurant, now also dead. Halfway through dinner the waiter asked to speaks to me in private. Then he said: ‘I am a respectable married man and if that gentleman comes out again I ...”