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“... present the geographer as the student of landscape, as the environmentalist and as the ideologist. Richard Muir looks at the landscape as nature’s stage. Ian Simmons and Michael Tooley, with their team of scientists, identify the stages of nature as they have changed through the successive periods of British prehistory. David Stoddart’s conclave of ...”

“... Expeditionary forces and the French Armies from the very first days of the First World War up to May 1917. In 1915 when the failure of ‘his’ Dardanelles expedition had lost him his Cabinet seat, Churchill had gone back to soldiering. He had been offered the command of a brigade on the now entrenched Western Front, and had tried unsuccessfully to get this ...”

“... basket cases of the Queen Anne period. It would have been impossible for Swift, however much he may have sympathised with those hapless victims of nature’s malignity and man’s exploitative instincts, to understand their feelings, let alone convey them. The growing concern for suffering humanity in the next two centuries seldom extended to freaks, who ...”

“... to be withdrawn from the mainland to try to hold the line in Crete, itself abandoned at the end of May. At the same time, the new Iraqi regime bombed the British base at Habbaniya. The capture of Ethiopia that month, and the return of its emperor, Haile Selassie, was of little consolation. Wavell was now in Churchill’s sights. The last straw was his initial ...”

“... January 1940, Staël, who had enlisted in the Foreign Legion, joined his regiment in Algeria. In May, France confronted defeat, but it was not until September that Staël was demobilised and rejoined Jeannine and her son, who had moved to Nice. In 1942 Jeannine gave birth to a daughter, Anne, and, in September 1943, all four moved back to Paris, which was ...”

“... Descriptions​ of Richard Titmuss often drew on the language of otherworldliness. He was ‘the high priest of the welfare state’ according to an assessment quoted in the ODNB. His entry there considers, though judiciously rejects, his frequent characterisation as a ‘saint’; understandably, it doesn’t cite his LSE colleague Michael Oakeshott’s description of him as ‘a snake in saint’s clothing ...”

“... birds.’ Robin is more likely to be a nickname for Robert, though the resonance with ‘robber’ may also count for something, and Hood may suggest his frequent disguises, for Robin is a great trickster whose masquerades inevitably bamboozle his foolish oppressors: he specialises in pretending to help people capture Robin ...”

“... what could be a meter. He says he’s working at a house nearby but needs to check our drain which may have a hairline crack. He makes to come in, but I say that if there is any work needs doing we have a builder of our own and in any case my partner deals with all that. He then claims to have spoken to my ‘boyfriend’ who says it’s OK. I shut the door on ...”

“... British Consulate in Florence on 29 September 1913, a Monday. According to his death certificate, Richard Roberts, a 67-year-old Justice of the Peace and builder, staying at the Hotel Londres & Métropole in Florence, died at the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova on Saturday, 27 September 1913. The consul, Alfred Lemon, was informed of the death by R. Ellis ...”

“... Richard and Clare Winston are well-known as the authors of elegant and accurate translations of some of Thomas Mann’s essays and correspondence, including The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. While annotating that selection, Richard Winston began assembling material for what he intended to be an extensive biography of the writer ...”

“... suspected ‘post-mortem room and anatomy room porters’ and speculated that ‘imitative action may have come into play.’ He suggested the killings were acts of emulation, committed by more than one maniac, possibly including someone bent on ‘world regeneration’. Whatever the truth of this, the phrase ‘Jack the Ripper’ represented a gothic state ...”

“... media, and deployed his wealth to political and personal advantage. (In 2008, in a verdict that may or may not have been political in nature, he and his wife were convicted in absentia of a multi-million-pound property cheat.) He was cheerfully unabashed about diverting government largess towards regions that voted for ...”

“... Parliament Trust have done less to write the history of Parliament than to prove that its history may be too complex and amorphous to write at all. Ironically perhaps, the fact that several of these familiar reservations apply to the new four-volume The House of Commons, 1386-1421 does not detract at all from its resounding success. In the first place, as ...”

“... of the Gadsden flag, which became the symbol for the storming of the US Capitol. These protesters may be Canadian but the world they inhabit has a lot of American furniture – one person detained by the police thought the First Amendment would protect him. More worrying was the discovery of a stash of weapons – long guns, handguns, body armour, ammunition ...”

“... the giants celebrated ad nauseam in Jurassic Park and Walking with Dinosaurs. Hard though it may seem to associate avian elegance with cumbersome and ferocious behemoths this was the story told by the cladograms, revealed by interpreting the bones of the famous old bird Archaeopteryx unfettered by preconceived notions. That theory has been triumphantly ...”