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“... Richard Holt begins his book on French sport with two misleading observations. In the one, he recalls that when, in the course of his research, a pile of books on football or on cycling arrived on his desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his neighbours were bemused by his reading material. How extraordinary that he never seems to have found himself sitting next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf ...”

“... close competitor was brought out from the shadows where he now lurks, uncollected and unread. For Richard Holt Hutton was a prodigious and impressive critic. And unlike Arnold he made literary (and theological) criticism his profession. Hutton was the author of about seven thousand reviews and essays. He edited the Spectator from 1861 until his death in ...”

“... When I watched him paying tribute to Billy Wright on an ITV programme, evoking (as, according to Richard Holt and Alan Tomlinson in their essay, he often does) the lost world of a handful of heroes – Wright himself, Nat Lofthouse, Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews – it was impossible, even allowing for a certain artifice on Mr Major’s part, not to ...”

“... The proof helps us still less with Stephen Hawking’s question, adduced on the first pages of Jim Holt’s book: ‘Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?’ Mattering and bothering are important issues in Holt’s quest, but they tend to be treated as entailments and sidebars, marginalia to the big ...”

“... seems to want to dispense altogether with the methods of modern scholarship. Professor Holt observes that Robin Hood has a unique distinction: his is the only entry in the Dictionary of National Biography devoted exclusively to proving that its subject never existed. But he has another distinction too. Over the last twenty years or so, he has ...”

“... and people, high and low, were ready, even eager, to take advantage of the new royal courts. J.C. Holt, in his classic study of the Charter published at the time of the 750th anniversary and now reissued, is as pro-John as it is possible for a sane historian to be, and never misses an opportunity to point out where John’s arguments had genuine merit and how ...”

“... from being again lost to public view, that her friend and literary executor Hazel Holt, and her sister Hilary Pym, have put together from the writer’s journals and letters what they call an ‘Autobiography’, A Very Private Eye. Its very title suggests a joky apologetic gesture towards what is seen as the problem of being a private writer ...”

“... of reference and a stimulus to further research. The collection of essays edited by Gillingham and Holt is concerned with war and the state – and in particular with the machinery used by governments to pay for these enormously expensive wars. This is a valuable group of papers by pupils and associates of John Prestwich which reflects his own rigorous ...”

“... followed.After Pym died in 1980, her sister, Hilary, and Pym’s close friend and colleague Hazel Holt, put together an ‘autobiography’ from her letters and diaries: A Very Private Eye (1984). Holt’s biography proper was published in 1990. She was lavish with quotation, relying on Pym’s endlessly entertaining voice ...”

“... in attainments, would be T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, Peter Fleming (perhaps both Flemings) and Richard Hughes. It makes no difference that Lawrence was half-Irish, the Flemings mostly Scottish, and Hughes partly Welsh. The presidential or father figure of the group would be John Buchan, another Scot, whose innings was over before the younger ones started ...”

“... have been remarkably successful in this. At the start of the 18th century, when Chief Justice Holt was hearing argument in the great constitutional case of Ashby v. White (which established the courts’ jurisdiction to see fair play in elections), the Speaker of the House appeared with his retinue and threatened to have ...”

“... letter from an old Boer War acquaintance, a mining engineer who had recently acquired a Holt Caterpillar Tractor with surprising powers of travelling across country. As Swinton says, ‘this knowledge lay dormant in my mind until ten weeks after the War had broken out. When it did recur to me it was as if a ray of light had struck a sensitised ...”

“... and invasion plans. Yet the government wasn’t of one mind. The secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, remained anxious to build better relations with Germany and at first didn’t hesitate to express his impatience with the scare: when asked by Sir John Barlow, MP for Frome, whether he was aware that there were 66,000 German soldiers in England ...”

“... some years after Johnson’s death, when a schoolmaster and part-time journalist called John Holt published a short interview with him in the July 1793 issue of the Gentleman’s Magazine. He described him thus: ‘Francis is … low of stature, marked with the small-pox; has lost his teeth; appears aged and infirm, clean and neat, but his cloaths the ...”

“... in the house but the only non-library book of autobiography was I Haven’t Unpacked by William Holt, who had got away from the dark, satanic mills by buying a horse and riding through England. The Armley library was at the bottom of Wesley Road, the entrance up a flight of marble steps under open arches, through brass-railed swing doors panelled in stained ...”