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“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”

“... the end of the 18th century topography is firmly part of English landscape painting in the work of Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, all of whom are represented. The value of this book to architectural historians is immense, since many of the houses illustrated have since been altered or rebuilt, or have altogether disappeared, like the ...”

“... in the way of hard incident occurs. One day Nella Last receives a present of a premature baby in a brown paper bag – ‘a wee hen for you to coddle’, according to the messenger. The mother has the flu and this temporary fostering is the idea of the doctor, anxious to spare the baby infection. When the infant’s aunt, a bit of a wag, arrives from Ireland ...”

“... which survives in British Library Harley MS 2250.)The manuscript is unprepossessing. It is a bit brown and the scribal hand is functional, unremarkable, almost ugly. For Simon Armitage the scribe’s letter forms are ‘like crusading chess pieces’, which is a disservice to chessmen. Sometime after it was written, it was illustrated by an artist endowed ...”

“... Indonesian rendang or the strange but compelling Japanese karē raisu, or curry with rice, a thick brown roux-thickened curry sauce introduced to the Japanese by Royal Navy officers in the late 19th century, which has been reintroduced into Britain as a Japanese delicacy, notably by the Wagamama restaurant chain. But none of these curries would have been ...”

“... I have in my mind of a familiar living-room, armchair, my father in it, silvery hair, moustache, brown suede lace-ups, and me, aged six or so, sitting on his knee. The layout is correct – I have been back to the block of flats and sat in the living-room of the flat next door, with the same floor plan. Door in the right place; chair I’m sure accurate, a ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’.* In 2009 the Ministry of Defence commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown to carry out a review of British strategy, later released under the Freedom of Information Act as the ‘Operation Telic Lessons Compendium’. Brown concluded that the army hadn’t been prepared for the occupation, and ...”

“... historical and autobiographical questions and then hares off to tackle the former. This means that Richard Evans had an untilled field before him. Based on unrestricted access to Hobsbawm’s personal archive, this is one of those doorstopper biographies that can get published in Britain even when the subject is a historian. It clocks in at 662 pages of text ...”

“... poor might also wear cast-offs, but carefully patched – most colours faded to a drab greenish-brown, so the patches broadly matched the rest. Particular occupations – butchers, for example, or printing workers or locksmiths, were readily distinguishable from the stains on their aprons and clothes, and since both wigs and hair were worn plentifully ...”

“... recent French presidential election rubbed the point in painfully; as has the elevation of Gordon Brown on this side of the Channel. Neither Roberto Unger nor Jacques Attali undervalues the achievements of social democracy, or indeed of state socialism. But both suggest that in either case any reprise or development now depends on finding a different ...”

“... the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”

“... fool who can make a bad species and worse genera is a “Naturalist”.’ And another biologist, Richard Owen, made light of herbarium work as ‘the attaching of barbarous binomials to dried foreign weeds’. Partly because of its association with more general economic and cultural concerns, partly because it was so widely conceived as merely ...”

“... Swann’s Way offers the refreshingly simple ‘Time was when I always went to bed early’, while Richard Howard proposes going into print with ‘Time and again, I have gone to bed early.’ One can argue the toss indefinitely over the respective strengths of these different renderings. Grieve’s ‘Time was’ and Howard’s ‘Time and again’ have the ...”

“... come next. Blair felt he was really getting things done at the point when his struggle with Gordon Brown was over. But it wasn’t because he had worked out how to deal with an obstructive rival; it was because he had ultimately been defeated by him. He was liberated by having little left to lose. Obama has been increasingly willing to assert his executive ...”

“... and the Attlee Government, lost their places on the National Executive to Harold Wilson and Richard Crossman, the candidates of the Left. Dalton sulked, but Morrison made a shrewd and emollient speech against self-gratifying Conference resolutions which failed to impress working-class voters. Crossman himself was booed for confessing his intention to ...”