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“... On 16 March 1810​ a Mrs Martin, a ‘labourer’s wife’, was working a field near Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon when she turned up an old gold signet ring bearing on its bezel the initials ‘W.S.’ It was bought for 36 shillings by Robert Bell Wheler, a local historian, and later donated to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, where it still resides ...”

“... is that it is a good, readable story. Hermann Broch is considered ‘very hard to read’, wrote Martin Seymour-Smith in his useful guide, Novels and Novelists. ‘He used most of the Modernist technical devices available to him, but mainly stream of consciousness.’ Broch’s work has often attracted comments like that and they sound, to the general ...”

“... think tank pamphlet. Two of those hired to fill senior editorial positions, Charles Leadbeater and Martin Jacques, were ex-Communists who had wound up their party and formed Demos, a research centre aligned to Tony Blair’s New Labour project. Geoff Mulgan, a former Trotskyist and director of Demos, became a contributor to the paper’s opinion pages, as did ...”

“... emphatic support for many of the arguments about hostility to industry recently expounded by Martin Wiener in his English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980. Women are another group who seem peripheral to this male and mandarin world. In explaining why there were so few of them in the earliest volumes of the DNB, Lee noted that ...”

“... the story thoroughly, with good references and a sprinkling of updates, but there is no advance on Martin Arnold’s The Vikings: Culture and Conquest (2006), or Robert Ferguson’s The Hammer and the Cross (2009), or even Gwyn Jones’s magisterial History of the Vikings (1968, revised 1973). Consider the ‘key questions’ Parker starts with. First, why ...”

“... inequality like Stephan Thernstrom, advocates of a social-anthropological approach such as Keith Thomas, partisans of a politically committed history of everyday life like Raphael Samuel and the History Workshop, and more besides. The world of history seemed then to be not just expanding but exploding, into areas undreamed of by the political and diplomatic ...”

“... is the family’s great collection of paintings, including first-rate 18th-century portraits by Thomas Gainsborough, Joshua Reynolds, Arthur Devis, John Opie, Jonathan Richardson and Richard Cosway, among others. The small, unattributed canvas he disposes of in 1928 is not in the same league. But it does come with an intriguing back story. Most of Henry ...”

“... In the opening pages of Thomas Mann’s novel, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the hero debates a question which has always worried him: which is better for the careerist, to see the world small or to see it big? The small view has its attractions. Great statesmen and empire-builders must see the world this way, Krull thinks: like a chessboard, with human pieces that can be manoeuvred coldly and boldly as the player rises above the mass of mankind ...”

“... Ass is funny. The idea, as well as the drawing, of ‘The Right Hon. Dress Suit, wearing his Jimmy Thomas’ is funny. (George Lansbury said he could never again see Thomas without thinking of it.) Low was also remarkable for his good humour. This is exemplified in his Lloyd George, whom he never managed to draw as other ...”

“... The post-Resurrection events were uncanny (persons vanishing through solid doors, the behaviour of Thomas and so on), but whoever originally told these stories believed them in quite a different sense from the way their authors believed the infancy stories, or the way they strike a modern historian. What must be his reaction when he contemplates the ...”

“... of the threat posed by ‘the man’ (unnamed until later) the novel begins as explosively as Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, where Michael Henchard puts his wife up for sale. Eilis understands where the man is coming from, as if his belligerence were a tribal norm: ‘She had known men like this in Ireland. Should one of them discover that ...”

“... the stomach: fortunately for the doctor, not so fortunately perhaps for poor 19-year-old Alexis St Martin, a fistula remained which had to be plugged to keep food in, but which also provided an unexcelled window into what happened to food once it disappeared down the throat. So, in what a standard account calls one of the most romantic episodes in the history ...”

“... There’s your big six. Now get a life. When he wins (with his wife and producer Emma Thomas at his side), the engagingly modest Nolan will roll out the speech he knows by heart, about the Bomb as the great adventure and turning point of modern times, the exhilarating teamwork that gave us the big bang, and so on. The same attitude gave us ...”

“... handcuffed by a white police officer while attempting to open his own front door; in 2012 Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old on his way home from a convenience store in Florida, was murdered by a neighbourhood watchman called George Zimmerman; in 2014 the killings of Brown and Eric Garner, an unarmed man from Staten Island who was choked to death by a ...”

“... had tapped into an invitation to say hello sent out by intelligent beings from another galaxy. Martin Ryle, the future astronomer royal, was in charge of the group. His response was unambiguous: if they had really found extra-terrestrials they should immediately dismantle the new telescope and not tell a soul about the signals, on the grounds that they ...”