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“... detested the idea of a standing army was always ready to flock to any parades, reviews, field days or mock battles that were going; only the sourest radicals enjoyed seeing the country’s greatest soldier being blown from his horse. And crowds flocked to Astley’s Amphitheatre, where spirited reconstructions of the battle of Waterloo were ...”

“... for the convenience of making marginal notes’. Some leave distracting, even disgusting residues. Andrew Lang wrote in 1905 about reading Ann Radcliffe: The thick double-columned volume in which I peruse the works . . . belongs to a public library. It is quite the dirtiest, greasiest, most dog’s-eared, and most bescribbled tome in the collection. Many of ...”

“... lawyers’ talk about striking the balance between competing interests is largely misplaced in a field (environmental law is only one example) in which success for either side inexorably involves damaging knock-on effects – for instance, the effect on the urban poor of planning decisions which protect beauty spots from pollution by concentrating it in ...”

“... in the postwar years. By far the greatest military figure wartime Britain produced was Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, the victor of Taranto and Cape Matapan, whose remit it was, as commander in chief of the Mediterranean theatre, to protect the British army in North Africa. Yet there is no mention of Montgomery in Cunningham’s autobiography, A Sailor’s ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... art of extracting the gloom of the eclipse from sunshine; and she has recently laboured in this field not without success or (as we used to say) not without a blessing. It is strange: ‘we fell out my wife and I’ the other night: she tackled me savagely for being a canary-bird; I replied (bleatingly) protesting that there was no use in turning life into ...”

“... it with salt and water and cooked the mixture on hot stone slabs. Bread!At​ some point, in a field of emmer in the Levant, a new kind of wheat started to grow: the ancestor of modern bread wheat. Given its subsequent history, the most surprising thing about bread wheat is that the original hybrid wasn’t engineered by humans but arose spontaneously. An ...”

“... tokens of scholarship, and it would be churlish to complain. But with each new venture into the field Elvis undergoes modification and change. While his supporters, smarting at unsavoury rumours, maintain he stayed smart to the end, the rest speculate about unsocial behaviour and a diet which consisted primarily of pretzels and pills. So business booms, and ...”

“... was already noted for its dramatic spectacles, and the RI was a relatively junior player in the field. It had been founded on the claim that its professors would use rational knowledge to improve agriculture and industry. In practice, however, this proved exceedingly difficult, and the Friday Evening Discourses were themselves a kind of public experiment in ...”

“... by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would embark on the joke. When he’d finished he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll give you back your day’ and ring off. The last joke he told me, only a week or two before his death, concerned a ...”

“... York … was Henry Geldzahler.’ When the director of the Met, Thomas Hoving, wanted to put on an Andrew Wyeth show, Geldzahler was against it – Wyeth’s figurative paintings were the very opposite of the art he believed in and succoured. But when it became clear the show would go ahead, Geldzahler ‘wrote privately to Wyeth himself, offering to curate ...”

“... rugby based on kicking for three-quarters of a game suddenly throwing the ball around the field as though it were a hot potato. What they are doing is throwing away their principles, too, because if you believe in a kicking game, then adhere to that. Don’t just switch to a totally different style only because you are behind and in trouble. What sort ...”

“... long-term beneficiary: the Olympic Stadium is being remodelled as the Braves’ new baseball field. In making money from the Olympics, the Braves are being faithful to the spirit that built modern Atlanta. Calling itself the capital of the New South, and with a phoenix on its seal, Atlanta saw itself as a commercial and industrial centre that had risen ...”

“... to create is played out. His findings are damning. On 5 October 1965, as the massacres began, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, Britain’s Ambassador in Jakarta, told the Foreign Office: ‘I have never concealed from you my belief that a little shooting in Indonesia would be an essential preliminary to effective change.’ On the following day, the Foreign Office in ...”

“... space. Anyone who has flown into Venice from the west will have noticed the unusually rectilinear field systems (Google Earth will show you too), a legacy of Roman surveyors two millennia ago, and far from unique: Roman conquerors and colonists left this type of centuriation behind wherever they went. Roman milestones and boundary markers are staples of dusty ...”