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“... maker, the washerwoman and her daughter hawking dripping door to door. And, with some help from Henry Mayhew and from modern historians like Stedman Jones, Anna Davin has indeed delivered such segments of the Late Victorian and Edwardian labouring poor from the patronage of friend and foe. She has done so with a strong historical sympathy and a realism that ...”

“... mostly spent at home, where the unsatisfactory interior of Colne Road and its ‘unutterable’ green linoleum formed an ever more peculiar contrast to his bedroom, with its life-size plaster bust of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. Less a cuckoo than a peacock in the parental nest, as the 1960s dawned Strong worked on his parallel project of ...”

“... a nightmare, for instance, until it has a successful ending. (This latter is reminiscent of Henry James’s account in A Small Boy and Others of a ‘dream-adventure’, an ‘immense hallucination’, in which he turned the tables on enemies who were trying to break into his room by bursting open the door and scattering them.) Schatzman encouraged Ruth ...”

“... and written in Wainwright’s evenings. He was Borough Treasurer of Kendal. His small house on the Green had one public room and here he worked while his wife and son, who had nowhere else to go, were made to sit in silence. No telephone, no television. Precious few friends. ‘There was never a single free evening when I didn’t apply myself to the task with ...”

“... section I’d been sustained by the endless seeming supply of Swallows and Amazons and Anne of Green Gables. And I liked the woodcuts by Joan Hassall used on each Bowen volume, which – though I still like them very much – I can now see are a few shades more sentimental and simplifying than the words inside. (Bowen in a 1968 letter to William Plomer at ...”

“... Around him he gathered friends and like-minded acquaintances. His closest friend was the painter Henry Fuseli; his most notable protégés included Wordsworth and Mary Wollstonecraft. For decades, until Johnson’s death in 1809, they came in varying combinations to his weekly dinners, where the vitality of the conversation made up for the dullness of the ...”

“... in this way, the mathematical sublime has cast its spell. At the end of the fourth act of Henry V, the King asks his herald for details of the English dead at Agincourt. The herald hands over a paper, and the King reads: Edward, the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk, Sir Richard Ketly, Davy Gam, esquire; None else of name; and of all other men But ...”

“... when I arrived at Boston, the immigration officer commented on the length of time I’ve held a Green Card. ‘A Green Card is usually considered a path to citizenship,’ he said, a sentiment both irritatingly reproving and movingly patriotic. I mumbled something about how he was perfectly correct, and left it at ...”

“... Animal Snap. In the cluttered, narrow-windowed living-room of our house in the village of Hempton Green in Norfolk, my mother and I progressed from letters to words to sentences, stopping the game at intervals to listen to the BBC news crackling from the wireless, its fretwork grill sawn to represent an inappropriately Japanese-style rising sun. By the time ...”

“... Rayleigh, who became head of the Cavendish Laboratory and won the Nobel Prize for Physics, and Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher who with his wife Eleanor Balfour founded Newnham College. In 1896, he joined his brothers-in-law, along with James Bryce, G.K. Chesterton, R.B. Haldane and Sir Oliver Lodge in founding the Synthetic Society, which, in an ...”

“... of black or red velvet for the tragedies, white or pastel satin for the comedies, and dark green or blue brocade for the history plays – and with no props other than a large reading desk, some piled-up books and a pair of candelabra, Kemble became as famous for her Falstaffs and Prosperos as for the heroines she played as a young woman. Louisa May ...”

“... in the world of Huckleberry Finn? Wolterstorff has a keen eye for the logical conundrum. Suppose Henry Kissinger were to play the lead role in a play about Henry Kissinger. Would we have the same relation there between actor and character as we have between, say, an actor and Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman? And what ...”

“... the case histories of many individual works, from the Lindisfarne Gospels to the prayer book of Henry VIII, giving anecdotal accounts of the ways in which they were lost or found, preserved or destroyed. In Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts, Treharne covers similar ground, concentrating as Wellesley does on British manuscripts. But she addresses a more ...”

“... crags latticed with icicles, towards Altissimo. Michelangelo chose stone and worked here, so did Henry Moore. A photo of Moore, sunburnt in a short-sleeved shirt, eyeing a boulder among clean-shaven cliffs and curls of old steel hawser, and soaring white-faced mountains, has drawn me to this place. On the terrace outside our cottage, the shiny black ...”

“... for a couple of weeks by ‘little people a few inches high, like elves or fairies, with little green caps, climbing up the sides of her wheelchair’. Similar characters are just as commonly witnessed by sufferers from migraine, epilepsy or Parkinson’s disease, those on mind-altering drugs such as DMT (dimethyltryptamine) or magic mushrooms, or in ...”