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“... where the phylum or the city will end up – or whether the city is making us worse or better. Rosemary Ashton’s Victorian Bloomsbury offers a less vertiginous outlook on the terrain by surveying one corner of it. Her focus is on ‘the activities of an earlier set of Bloomsbury-based pioneers, men and women of the 19th century who fought against ...”

“... the only one to take any explicit interest in feminism. Her Descent of Woman, a riposte to Desmond Morris and other ‘male-centred’ evolutionists, appeared in 1972. If the CCC felt any envy (or approval) of the greater opportunities available to their daughters none of them mentioned it, though Cornelia was disappointed to discover that despite all that had ...”

“... of pastoral romance to which Mediterranean Food belonged. Like Leach’s Japan and William Morris’s Middle Ages, it offered if not an innocent then a simpler world, ‘small and white and clean’, the sort of other Eden with which the English and at times the Scots have consoled themselves ever since they became too powerful as nations to be quite ...”

“... pathological … a house afflicted with elephantiasis’. As an absolute verdict on the age of Morris and Ruskin, however, it was ridiculous, though it still persists. Caine is sometimes too inclined to take at face value the post-Freudian Stracheys’ own estimation of themselves, especially their claim to be living lives of ‘unprecedented’ sexual and ...”

“... red-lipped and sultry-eyed at the wheel of a green Bugatti. Macaulay, however, has only an elderly Morris. She reflects that she is often stuck in traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury ...”

“... it was about Dorelia that exerted such fascination is difficult now to know. Perhaps like Janey Morris she had to be seen to be believed, though the effect was due only partly to her looks. Nicolette Devas, who was later absorbed as a child into the John household, recalled the impression she made on a sharp but innocent eye: Hers was a fierce beauty, a ...”

“... disciplining priests for officiating from the wrong side of the altar. As Ruskin and then Morris developed theories about the crafts and workmanship, the heterodox church at Wreay, which had so remarkably anticipated them, slipped into obscurity. It took another century for Losh’s profound, symbolic vision of the mysteries of time and creation to ...”

“... Margaret Biddulph, Rodmarton was finished in 1929, having been built over thirty years on William Morris principles of handwork. The materials were local as were the builders and furnishers, who produced joinery for the timber framing, needlework and metalwork. It was a reinvention of the country house as social force, ‘a quiet attempt to change the ...”

“... the crowd at a John Lewis sale, and similar remarks were made about the Iraq War protests. William Morris, a leading figure in the SDF, was issued with a summons for obstruction in July 1886, six years after his firm had been commissioned to decorate the throne room at St James’s Palace. In a demonstration on the afternoon of 1 March 1912, suffragettes broke ...”

“... the most interestingly historical of them, Y Gododdín, does so only tangentially. Whatever John Morris and Leslie Alcock may have written in the 1970s and 1980s, the evidence provides ‘no space … for an “Age of Arthur” during which a victorious British emperor-like figure held back the barbarian hordes’. That image really dates back to the ...”

“... the back of Blenheim Park. Here Rowse began collecting notes for a poem so I pointed out a great rosemary bush in flower to him and told him it was marjoram. I look forward to the published error. At North Leigh we saw Mr Hevesi gardening and hurried by (we hope) unseen. The Jacobean-Caroline rectory was beautiful with honeysuckle, clematis and lupins. The ...”

“... in the sales, and seemed never to acquire a handbag: acquaintances remember a trusty William Morris carrier, and she took a spongebag, Hermione Lee reports, to the Booker dinner. In her letters she uses the dotty-lady schtick for two main purposes. It’s there to entertain and mollify her daughters, on whom she depended for all sorts of ...”

“... with, she tried her hand at writing poetry. ‘Unicorn’, the star of the collection published by Rosemary Hill last year, first came out with a tiny press in 1963. A cardboard theatre and a vulgar virgin; a mythical beast with ‘little hooves’ that ‘click like false teeth’. At the age of 23, Carter had ‘arrived’, as Hill writes, ‘as it were in a ...”

“... of predilection. Sappho gets in, but not Patience Strong; ‘John’ Radclyffe Hall, but not Jan Morris; Julia Kristeva, but not Elizabeth David (nor Jane Grigson, nor even Mrs Beeton – writing about cooking does not rate high). Betty Friedan gets in, but not Mary Douglas; Hannah Arendt, but not Barbara Wootton. In general, journalists get a raw ...”

“... a parade which by 11 a.m. will stretch through the middle of the town is wearing a large sprig of rosemary. (That, courtesy of Ophelia, is for remembrance, though the scent seems less funereal than paschal.) Most celebrants are also carrying substantial mixed bouquets – in the economic life of Stratford’s florists, Shakespeare is nearly as important as St ...”