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“... polished bald heads. We don’t pay attention to the monster inflatables dressed in Gilbert and George outfits, attended by a squabble of kids and cameras. Art. It’s only art. A man in a tight suit is trying to force air into two face-painted condom figures. He is tethering them, reluctant windsocks, against the stiff breeze. And this again is Andrew ...”

“... horizontally in the grass, and it joins those of other Wykehamists who are remembered there: George Mallory, lost on Everest in 1924, and William Whiting, who wrote the hymn ‘Eternal Father, Strong to Save’. Archibald Wavell, one of the significant British military commanders of World War Two, as well as the penultimate viceroy of British India, was ...”

“... and most would quickly yield to his will. One of the few who did not is his authorised biographer, Walter Isaacson, a former managing editor of Time. Isaacson’s book is packaged as a eulogy, with lots of family photos and a plain white cover whose Helvetican simplicity is characteristic of Apple’s own designers in Cupertino. The black and white photo on ...”

“... to cover his armchairs.Worboys describes the ‘Canine Castle’, the dog-dealing emporium of Bill George, a ‘nobby West End butcher’ (‘nobby’ was London slang for those with social pretensions), who was known as the ‘Father of the Fancy’. The Fancy was a loose fraternity of working-class men with a passion for pub-based blood sports. (Charles ...”

“... and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.’ Of his friend the dotty scholar George Dyer: ‘With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new coat him in russia, and assign him to his place.’ In a marvellous vignette, Lamb makes a ‘sentiment’ – an English ...”

“... of 9/11, implying that it had shown great leadership in finding what happened that day very bad. George W. Bush has boiled doublethink down to a sticky residue: ‘you’re either for us or you’re for the terrorists’ is its central flavour. But choosing New York for the convention was overweening even by Republican standards: like Woody Allen, only less ...”

“... Lit, sometime PI and full-time avatar of the author) has plenty of superficial similarities to Walter Mosley’s Easy Rawlins project. Both men have received support from sharp-witted British independent presses. Mosley from Serpent’s Tail and Sallis from No Exit Press. Both men had early champions and a serious readership on this side of the ...”

“... paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central Park, and the Ramble, a wooded area popular with birdwatchers, is one of them. Cooper is 57 – almost exactly the age Joe ...”

“... survived the death of Puritanism. Carrying along nationalist historians like the Jacksonian George Bancroft, American Renaissance writers such as Hawthorne and Melville, and political leaders like Lincoln, the sacralisation of the United States created ‘the single most cohesive culture in the modern world’. Americans share not a common middle-class ...”

“... of Bulgaria and Dalmatia? Legends of a great flood permeated many traditions. In 1876, George Smith published his translations of the cuneiform writing preserved on baked-clay tablets from Mesopotamia – which recorded what we now call the Epic of Gilgamesh. These fragments from the great library of Nineveh spoke, in a language known as ...”

“... solidity of St Martin-in-the-Fields, how both structures dwarf Sir Francis Chantrey’s statue of George IV, and how the unfinished column, in extending out of frame, becomes the sign of a future to which, at least in this picture, neither crown nor church measures up. And then there’s the wooden hoarding that cuts diagonally along the lower edge. The ...”

“... In 1968, the Sunday Times ran a competition to translate Baudelaire’s sonnet ‘Spleen’, with George Steiner as judge. Steiner found himself receiving ‘fantastically mottoed’ envelopes from a variety of increasingly improbable authors and sources, all in the same green ink: W.H. Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord ...”

“... a whole are identical to the ones that were made in the 1820s, and are just as irrelevant. In 1867 Walter Bagehot pointed out how wrongheaded they were to complain about the attention paid to Victoria’s promenades at Windsor or the Prince of Wales’s trips to the Derby. Popular fascination with ‘a retired widow and an unemployed youth’, he insisted, was ...”

“... endeared him to the Conservative Central Office. As Norman Tebbit replied, in words reminiscent of Walter Bagehot, it is not surprising that the Prince is so sympathetic towards the unemployed: he is by way of being one of them himself. All this is indicative of a deeper change in perceptions of royalty that has taken place during the last decade or so. The ...”

“... to the rakish, ‘gay dog’ critic. Keynes also mortified Woolf by telling her that her memoir of George Duckworth, later published as 22 Hyde Park Gate, was the best thing she had ever done. He advised her bluffly to carry on in that vein, ‘write about real people & make it all up’, causing her to reflect that ‘if ...”