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“... of famine. As soon as resources were switched to finding an anti-malaria vaccine, disease levels rose steeply. The ancient remedy was ‘Jesuit bark’ or quinine, a staple of the African explorers, but this was replaced after World War Two by the alleged ‘miracle drug’, chloroquine. Chloroquine, however, was not cheap, and exhortations from the Third ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...”

“... been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, Richard Deakin, a Victorian botanist, published a volume devoted to the species he found growing on and around the Colosseum, a six-acre site which supported 420 different plants. Deakin is one of Woodward’s many unsung heroes. The conjunction of nature and ...”

“... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...”

“... contortions … But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.’ ‘The sexual implications of the scene,’ Elaine Showalter writes, ‘are embarrassingly clear.’ The sexism of the ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in Washington. It contained the killer quote: ‘The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ This confirmed, if confirmation were still needed, that Blair’s lie to the Commons was not a careless ...”

“... title is implicit in these lines from Book Six describing the war in heaven: now storming fury rose, And clamour such as heard in heaven till now Was never, arms on armour clashing brayed Horrible discord . . . The ‘clamor ad coelum’ becomes ‘clamour such as heard in heaven’ (and the internal rhyme on ‘armour’ places responsibility on the ...”

“... big stuff – the national plan, the new approach, to expand or die’. Industrial production rose by 11 per cent in the year after the pliable Heathcoat Amory’s 1959 election budget – a completely unsustainable gallop. Macmillan’s obsession with expansion and his utter neglect of inflation were of course a reaction to the bitter experience of the ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”

“... and minds. The Kentish gospeller John Newman explained the matter to the turncoat bishop of Dover, Richard Thornden. He and his fellow gospellers, he declared, had drunk too deep of the teaching of the Edwardine reformers to renounce it simply on command. For, he told Thornden, their doctrine was not beleued of vs sodainly, but by their continuall ...”

“... effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the jury, that the Commander-in Chief’s Official Report on the Falklands War had been tampered with behind his back, in relation to the crucial timing of the contact between HMS ...”

“... heart’. She fosters nostalgie de la banlieue, the feeling that made one wish V. S. Pritchett and Richard Cobb would never get to the last page of their childhood memories. You could adapt the famous remark about religious sects and say that England has sixty kinds of suburb and only one sauce – except that sixty would be an underestimate and all of them ...”

“... generator failed, the people inside Memorial stopped thinking of it as a hospital. Foul water rose eight feet high. Without air-conditioning, the temperature was above 40ºC. The plumbing system stopped working, as did the phones, refrigerators and lifts. The morgue flooded and they ran out of body bags. The stink of human shit, dog shit, the dead, was ...”