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“... unpalatable truths not really confronted in any of the other books. As the food writer Jill Norman explains in her excellent introduction, people could not have been fed as nutritiously and relatively equitably had ‘food preparation, preservation, storage and transport’ not been industrialised: flesh compressed and tinned in the forms of Spam and ...”

“... 1087, a deputation of Pisan and Genoese officials went to Sicily hoping to convince the island’s Norman conqueror to help them attack the prosperous trading entrepot of Mahdia on the Tunisian coast. In response, Count Roger I – a handsome, forthright and pragmatic man – ‘lifted his thigh, made a great fart’ and complained about the trouble that would ...”

“... Decades after his visit, he set a class at Yale the task of redesigning Le Corbusier’s gleaming white house, the Villa Savoye, retaining the energy of its plan and composition but using traditional materials and techniques. Whatever did or did not happen in Marseille, it didn’t stop Krier from going to London in 1968 to work for James Stirling. Often ...”

“... for which Epstein takes – and is usually given – personal credit). The fall came with the white flight from the metropolis to the suburbs, leaving independent booksellers in the cities without walk-in custom. Enter, in 1969, the book chains, serving a ‘malled’ and wheeled America and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose ...”

“... it is at present.’ Few wrote about New York as a city close to extinction as dramatically as Norman Mailer. Appalled by the decay, violence, apathy and chaos of New York in the late 1960s, Mailer decided to run for mayor in 1969, the year he won a Pulitzer Prize for The Armies of the Night. Much of what Mailer proposed in 1969 still seems ...”

“... the floor of a Dominican church. Among the gravestones was a particularly striking one in grey-white marble with pink and blue veins. Two helmets with slits for eyes faced each other, like a pair of beaky dolphins about, clangingly, to kiss: ‘Tomb Slab of an English Couple’, the label in Istanbul’s Archaeological Museum says. The couple were ...”

“... range of hard-to-find and closely held records, were followed by more sociologically diverse white ethnic groups whose members formed their own descent organisations and wrote their own family histories. More women participated, and an extensive infrastructure of newspapers, libraries, specialised magazines and guidebooks grew up to support their ...”

“... one knew what happened in the Twenties because no one living today was alive then. And the famous Norman Mailer, who had a hammock suspended under the roof of his New York apartment so that when, as he put it, ‘things got boring,’ the whole family could rush from the gallery on the second floor and jump into it. And finally Ronald Reagan himself, who when ...”

“... woman who tries to compete with her husband’s fantasy sex partners hasn’t a hope. She’s the Norman Tebbit of feminism, a founder member of the on-yer-bike branch of the women’s movement; and I don’t imagine she’ll be sorry to think that it’s all over for her contemporaries; that for us what she memorably calls ‘the ...”

“... as Mr Kettle proceeds, we still lack an authoritative account of the Russian civil war (like Norman Stone’s The Eastern Front), so that certain judgments on Allied policy must remain provisional, however rich the Allied records. Why did Britain become involved in Russia? Basically because the War Cabinet feared that a Russian withdrawal from the ...”

“... Muir. The Beckinsales – one native to the north Cots-wolds and the other to the Vale of the White Horse – present what is for them the English heartland. Richard Muir, nostalgic for the Nidderdale hamlet of Birtwhistle, offers his view of the evolving English village. Both books communicate the enjoyment that their authors have had in compiling ...”

“... unintentionally hilarious pages. Throughout, he refers to himself in the third person, rather as Norman Mailer and my small children do; though my kids, of course, do it only when they know they’ve been naughty and wish to neutralise rage with bogus charm. Gay Talese did all this dreary work – nearly a decade of listening to socially disorganised wankers ...”

“... words. Fergusson wants the great lexicographer to be fed, among many other oatmeal-rich dishes, ‘white and bloody puddins routh,/To gar the Doctor skirl, O Drouth!’ Here Watson’s line-by-line glossary will assist the uninitiated, who may feel that they have come a long way from the Latinate English of ‘the frost subdu’d, / Gradual, resolves into a ...”

“... thereby gave the proposal a legitimacy it would otherwise have lacked. In the Pentagon and in the White House, he used his credentials as a former soldier to lobby anyone who would listen: without radical change, he warned, the Iraq war was headed towards a disastrous end. Keane also encouraged Odierno, a former subordinate, to resist the guidance he was ...”

“... which themselves rest on an old and interesting – if very shaky – mythology. In spite of the Norman Conquest, and the proliferation of Latinate words in English, we’ve somehow remained Nordic in our linguistic hearts, and if Spree is also the name of a German river, so much the better. French is fancy and fashionable, but we aren’t going to fall for ...”