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“... governing elite. And that had consequences.Leaving Oxford in 1903, Tawney went to Toynbee Hall, the settlement house in East London, where Beveridge had taken the job of sub-warden. Like so many other morally serious and striving young Edwardians, he threw himself into social service, working for an organisation that sent poor children on restorative ...”

“... your answer to both questions is a strangulated ‘no’, then ‘you have some explaining to do.’ His own answer predictably took the form of a populist attack on the intelligentsia, the avantgarde and the soup-kitchens of the ‘dependency culture’. It was of course coincidental that the attack – based as it was on well-tried Anglo-American models ...”

“... Meta-beagling turns out to be Sutherland’s own rare ability. Dogged does not begin to do justice to the tenacity he has shown in pursuit of his subject’s pursuit of pong. Odour is front and centre in Orwell’s work, and Sutherland has provided some helpful ‘smell narratives’ that enable us to follow an oblique path through some of the ...”

“... curtains and the rich variety of outré library books crammed down the backs of sofas: the Marquis de Sade, Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, Octave Mirbeau’s Torture Garden. The 1917 revolutions, staged conveniently on his doorstep, caught him unawares. On 25 October, the night the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace, he was at home with his mother sorting ...”

“... fellow MP said to the author of this book: ‘He had one of the longest tongues for sycophancy I’d ever seen. He congratulated everyone on whatever they were doing. He was quite clearly destined for higher things.’ Since that lime Archer has enjoyed what newspapers like to call a ‘roller-coaster’ career, though it has more noticeably gone up than ...”

“... is so irrepressibly boys-will-be-boys. With Livingstone the imagination struggles. The best it can do is a jam jar with a newt inside: the boy is invisible. To will him into existence we need to envisage ways of thinking and behaving that have almost entirely disappeared, along with the social class that bred them in a certain city at a certain time. While the ...”

“... The portrait of Lord Goodman on the jacket of his memoirs is from a photograph; the one on David Selbourne’s book is from a portrait by Lucian Freud. In the first he looks severe but quizzical, a kind man but not a man to be put upon; in the second he looks quite desperately sad, as if he had done much to little or no avail, and might well have been put upon quite heavily ...”

“... thinks, ‘and leave my own pile of clothes next to a convenient body of water – the Cam would do.’ Apart from making up his family life (several stones about his father, an extra brother and sister he has invented for his girlfriend) Rayner confesses to stealing. He robs a neighbour’s house in Yorkshire, a house in Hammersmith and another in ...”

“... by professional historians, in themselves, and she decides, in her introduction, that she cannot do better than quote David Lowenthal: ‘Even if future insights show up present errors and undermine present conclusions, evidence now available proves that some things almost certainly did happen and others did ...”

“... perceptively as Steen Eiler Rasmussen, who saw it in 1937 as The Unique City. More recently, both David Piper in his Companion Guide (1964) and Christopher Hibbert in Biography of a City (1969) have written with elegance and comprehension, the first closer to the form of the traditional guidebook, the second to the style of the popular historian. Yet there is ...”

“... have been wider than that dividing two nominal moderates. Frank Chapple of the Electricians and David Basnett of the G and M. Chapple began the tradition of heroic truculence, justifiable if unsubtle anti-Communism, double arm’s-length relations with the TUC General Council and aggressive modernisation. Basnett, an honest man inheriting a measure of ...”

“... Barrett, who died of cancer in 1961 – Barrett was nearly 16. (There was Roger Waters, too, and David Gilmour – who’d replace Barrett within moments, almost, of the band’s success. Both were Cambridge boys. Both, Willis tells us, had messed around with paint pots in a late-toddler phase in the same Saturday morning ...”

“... the past, would-be biographers have been discouraged from poking their noses into the business of David Cornwell, the former spy who has written under that curious pseudonym since 1961. Robert Harris chose not to proceed, for reasons that are hinted at but not made clear in this book, while in the early 1990s the journalist Graham Lord withdrew under a heavy ...”

“... pull down my trousers and smack me at great speed with both hands. If my father was there he’d say repeatedly ‘Leave him alone!’ or, rather, its equivalent in Yiddish, a language he normally reserved for confidences about money. My mother used his mollycoddling of me – whom he called his ‘pet lamb’ – as her excuse for favouring my ...”

“... LET ME TELL YOU, IT WAS WONDERFUL.’ Maman, the giant spider already seen in the Tate’s turbine hall in 2000, protects the sac of marble eggs attached to her abdomen and menaces the viewer. ‘My best friend was my mother and she was deliberate, clever, patient, soothing, reasonable, dainty, subtle, indispensable, neat and useful as an ...”