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“... house, into the lavatory, and then, when she becomes a truant and a runaway, she walks up Highdown Hill and sits in the open air. In The Child that Books Built (2002), Francis Spufford’s self-portrait of the author as reader, he tracks his journey from picture books to teenage comics and his first encounters with pornography. His childhood was lonely because ...”

“... with drains and contagion, Francis Galton puzzling over ‘defect’ and degeneracy, Octavia Hill setting up model housing and disciplining her unruly tenants, Charles Booth sending his army of volunteers out to categorise and analyse London’s working class. Some of the sons and daughters of those evangelical shipping magnates and manufacturers who ...”

“... Beardsley’s unfinished literary tour de force, published in expurgated form as ‘Under the Hill’ in the Savoy and in full after his death, presents an extraordinary catalogue of bizarre practices. Its anti-hero, transposed from the Middle Ages to the 18th century as a chevalier or an abbé, enters a grotto deep within the Venusburg, the mons veneris ...”

“... voice’ say in her head: ‘Having nothing, yet possessing all things’. She strode on over the hill, all hobbledehoy and bundled up against the cold, and suddenly filled with that extraordinary elation which springs, Storm Jameson said, ‘from the sense of having lost everything. It is a feeling like no ...”

“... became a lifelong devotee of ‘its plain narrative, its picture of life as a pilgrimage over hill and dale, where surprising adventures lurked by the wayside, a hard road with now and then long views to cheer the traveller’. There were happy, outdoorsy times in upper Tweeddale, the birthplace of his mother, Helen. A cultured uncle introduced him to ...”

“... by Charlie Chaplin, who seems to have been on everyone’s guest list. Lawrence knew John and Susan Buchan, country-house owners of the new weekending sort, and spent his time with them talking about ‘the Arabs … his muddled masochism and his … disillusion’; Baldwin appears at Warwick Castle and at Madresfield, which was in part the model for ...”

“... this and claimed that he had had no idea who attacked Nigel Bartlett. About half an hour later, Susan Parashar, who lived nearby in Whittington Road, bumped into her son and his friends while she was taking her dogs for a walk. A large man came up and began, incoherently, to talk to them. He tried to pat one of her dogs, but it growled at him and the man ...”

“... informed that skeletal remains had been found by a man out walking with his children on Shelling Hill beach, which is essentially a continuation of Templetown beach. Some members of the family say their mother was identified by a blue nappy pin attached to her cardigan. Helen says this is nonsense. Jean McConville had been shot once in the back of the ...”

“... bitched that she was ‘screaming’ and Bob Cusack, the editor of the political newspaper the Hill, said: ‘When Hillary Clinton raises her voice, she loses.’ One could get the impression that a woman should campaign in a sultry whisper, but of course if she did that she would not project power. But if she did project power she would fail as a ...”

“... beginning of the 17th century, many were troubled by questions of sleep. The mother of 11-year-old Susan Blundell told Napier that her daughter was ‘now given mutch to sleeping’, and that two days before, she had slept ‘the space of 24 houres but that her sleepe was interrupted with her usuall fites & that very often.’ Margery Dayrell worried that her ...”

“... the truthfulness of her tales should not necessarily cost her her novelist’s licence, since as Susan Morgan observes, ‘there is a long and honourable tradition in English fiction of insisting that a particular book is actually true.’ On the other hand, as Morgan also acknowledges, this particular romance happened to accuse a prominent figure, recently ...”

“... heartnear’. Geoffrey Hill had a good time with the title of Celan’s collection Atemwende, or Breathturn (1967). In The Orchards of Syon (2002) he anglicises ‘breathturn’ into ‘turn of breath’. But he also has ...”

“... Stella, Noland, Louis, Frankenthaler, Olitski, Poons; his Britons, Caro, Tucker, Latham, Hill, Hockney, Richard Smith, Bernard Cohen, Denny, Hodgkin, Ayres, Buckley, while his one European was Pol Bury. So Kasmin’s choice was focused on abstraction, with Hockney as the joker in the pack, where Fraser’s was wider, though with an emphasis on ...”

“... that group into crisis and most of Hobsbawm’s fellow-travellers (E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill) left the party then or soon afterwards. Hobsbawm did not, concluding that the Soviet invasion, however agonising, was a necessary step in light of the danger of counter-revolution: ‘If we had been in the position of the Soviet government, we should have ...”

“... the settings changed accordingly, to the fictitious commuter burgs of Bullet Park and Shady Hill.) Like Fitzgerald, Cheever was, in his early novels (The Wapshot Chronicle, The Wapshot Scandal) and in stories like ‘The Enormous Radio’ and ‘The Pot of Gold’, concerned with the fragility of material success and of social status – which is to ...”