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“... at every street corner. They saw the end, even for the most renewable resources. One of these was Robert Lamb, who in 1979 published a book called World without Tree. ‘A survey of current evidence,’ he wrote, ‘shows that trees could be so scarce in a mere thirty years’ time that they would already be struggling to fulfil their purpose in the ...”

“... after the Gaelic of the ‘Carmina Gadelica’ Monday at 6 a.m. I heard a lamb, And then, while I sat by, A snipe’s kid-cry. I saw the cuckoo, grey as slate Before I ate. On Tuesday, late, A slimy flagstone shone Where snails had gone, And the wheatear, like Ash off a dyke, Flapped where the old mare’s black Foal stumbled and turned its back ...”

“... In May 1804, at the age of 18, Benjamin Robert Haydon left his home in Plymouth and set off for London to become a great artist. His mother was distraught, his father furious, but there was no doubt in Haydon’s mind either of his vocation or of his genius. He could have worked in his father’s bookshop and inherited a secure, independent income but he didn’t want to ...”

“... Even a smile​ could put Charles Lamb in mind of death. ‘The fine ladies, or fine gentlemen, who show me their teeth,’ he wrote, ‘show me bones.’ He cared not ‘to be carried with the tide that smoothly bears human life to eternity’.I am in love with this green earth, – the face of town and country, – the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets … Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and Summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself – do these things go out with life?Faced with the ‘inevitable spoiler’, Lamb lived as many lives as he could ...”

“... or deny that this gap exists. In English the most ambitious and effective bridge-builders were Lamb and Hazlitt. Before them, to be sure, were Addison and Steele: but those serious wits under Queen Anne were building bridges, very successfully too, not between the ephemeral and the enduring, but between relatively solid social entities. Their essays in the ...”

“... Anatomy of Bibliomania, a comprehensive treatment of obsessive book-buying in the manner of Robert Burton; and sometimes even a copy of Carter and Pollard’s Inquiry into the Nature of Certain 19th-Century Pamphlets, the exposé that dished Thomas J. Wise, forger of rare editions. It all seemed to contradict the rants of intellectuals about the ...”

“... the circulation had fallen from 1.5m to 650,000 copies. After the print unions refused to discuss Robert Maxwell’s offer for the paper, Murdoch stepped in. ‘I am constantly amazed at the ease with which I entered British newspapers,’ he later said. Stick it up your punter! tells that story, and the story of what happened afterwards: a story which social ...”

“... European culture – and as part of ‘high culture’, in ways outlined by Peter Burke and Robert Darnton. Science and technology can then be distinguished, and theoretical advances, in, say, the earth sciences, are not assumed always to have produced great practical breakthroughs. As one of the contributors, Steven Shapin, neatly turns it, Was ist ...”

“... this persuasion she did nothing to controvert – so that when her ardent admirer and close friend Robert Liddell engaged in a somewhat demeaning rummage in Burke and Crockford in search of distinguished Compton-Burnetts whether living or dead and gone, he was astonished to discover none at all. Both Burnetts and Comptons had in fact been farm labourers not ...”

“... Carlos Williams’s ‘To Ford Madox Ford in Heaven’. And you may say that his luck holds: for Robert Green is also an admirer, but his book is thoroughly sensible, unbedazzled and discriminating, the book of someone who has heard of other writers and is in no kind of ‘Special relationship’ to Ford. What he has set out to do, and it is a wise ...”

“... the material world remains essentially his own, a mode of seeing akin to that detected by Charles Lamb in the comic actor Joseph Munden: ‘A tub of butter, contemplated by him, amounts to a Platonic idea. He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primaeval man with the sun and stars ...”

“... At the time, Lytton Strachey was obsessed with the heterosexual painter and philanderer Henry Lamb, whom Cox had recently met and fallen for. She asked Lytton to invite Lamb, and he happily obliged. Lamb was looking for a new mistress and Cox was well-off, generous and ...”

“... with you to dinner on a scrag-end of mutton, and hot potatoes.’ And conversation with Charles Lamb was remembered with delight: ‘How often did we cut into the haunch of letters, while we discussed the haunch of mutton on the table!’ Hazlitt’s writing is frequently driven by this kind of dual appreciation; when we are told about the mutton on ...”

“... what shape it has (drink has a tendency to make things lose their shape), is between Hannah and Robert, an alcoholic dentist. Alcoholism and dentistry have coincided, more grotesquely, in Kennedy’s fiction before: a desperate character in Everything You Need (1999), a publisher called Jack Grace, visits a sadist in Soho to be administered alcohol ...”

“... long been a favourite subject for popular biography, and Marozzi’s book follows works by Harold Lamb, Hilda Hookham and John Ure. History writing at this level seeks to provide us with vivid pictures of how things must have been and even, at times, to allow us to enter the minds of the protagonists. Marozzi opens with an account of Tamerlane on the eve of ...”