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“... be altered to follow not what actually happened, but what ought to have done. Surely (in Ragtime) John Pierpont Morgan might have invited Henry Ford to lunch to talk about reincarnation; and why wouldn’t the anarchist Emma Goldman have given a full-body massage to the society divorcée Evelyn Nesbit (accompanied by a lecture on sexual politics)? These lines ...”

“... is and is not. The story, reprinted in Peake’s Progress, first appeared alongside stories by John Wyndham and William Golding in 1956, in a collection called Sometime, Never. Taken together the three stories read more like fables than fantasy or science fiction, and they glance curiously at the contemporary world they are not directly seeking to ...”

“... A large proportion of what the boys paid went directly to the Head. By the late 1850s, his gross takings (before paying his assistant staff) were somewhere between £10,000 and £12,000 – making him, as Christopher Tyerman calculates, ‘the equivalent of a modern millionaire’. In 1859 he might have expected to move on to the mastership of an ...”

“... mixing high and low authorities; long, feverish run-on sentences, desperately semaphoring their gross mimetic appetite, their need to capture as much of ‘the madness of the times’ as possible, as much of ‘the way we live now’; and a frequent oiling of italics. A parody would go like this: Brian idly fingered the minibar. It was happily ...”

“... scholarship, has the better of this debate. It has been convincingly shown that the martyrologist John Foxe’s admiring account was based on good evidence. In less than a fortnight of the spring of 1536, and almost in two days, the world of Anne Boleyn fell apart. The queen was charged and found guilty of multiple adultery, and all too soon she, together ...”

“... to the Roman people at the dedication of the Lateran Church that Constantine built’ (i.e. St John Lateran), and Sylvester, in the robes of papal office and attended by servants with holy vessels. True, the sculptor had failed to enter the year when all this happened. But the quality of the carvings, which resembled the crude reliefs on the Arch of ...”

“... to this effect. Although the American Statistical Association quickly identified ‘various and gross errors’ in the count (‘insane’ Blacks were recorded in some Massachusetts towns that had no Black population), the figures continued to be wielded by pro-slavery congressmen. Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of those who expressed outrage that ‘the ...”

“... 1971, but you can see it clearly in the film 10 Rillington Place starring Richard Attenborough and John Hurt, filmed on location shortly before demolition. The houses had bay windows going all the way down to the ground, and no front steps or front gardens. Number 10 was the last house on the left, jammed up against the wall of a disused factory whose chimney ...”

“... of Frank Vincent Zappa’s monstrous oeuvre. It’s a stroll to realign (straighten out) the gross products of this freak-wrangler supreme, the Laurel Canyon, cottage industry, family man. Zappa: boastfully non-PC, polymorphously perverse, the L. Ron Hubbard of multi-tracked deviance. An agnostic refusenik who gets paranoid standing next to his own ...”

“... merely pretending. Much of this ‘renewal’ had, of course, been achieved by Neil Kinnock and John Smith, while the numerical and political decline of the unions, together with a change in the composition of the electorate and the Labour Party’s membership, made ‘renewal’ much easier and, at least to some extent, necessary. Nevertheless, Mr Blair ...”

“... Montaigne, but was curiously silent about his many thefts from Burton. They were first spotted by John Ferriar, a Manchester physician, who in 1793 published a sympathetic but puzzled essay on Sterne’s indebtedness to the Anatomy: ‘I do not mean to treat him as a Plagiarist,’ he writes. ‘I wish to illustrate’ – to celebrate – ‘not to degrade ...”

“... before a special jury, at Warwickshire Assizes. The defendants included the venerable Major John Cartwright, the ‘Father’ of English Reformers; the editor of the Radical Black Dwarf, T.J. Wooler; and Edmonds, the secretary of the Birmingham reformers. Their offences arose out of the same context as the Peterloo meeting in support of manhood ...”

“... ship’s displacement tonnage was 52,310. The figure usually given – 46,000 – refers to its Gross Registered Tonnage, which is arrived at through a complicated algorithm and has nothing to do with ordinary measurements of weight.) One might have known that naming a ship after the defeated race of Greek deities was a mistake. Kronos, the leader of the ...”

“... pieces, such as Maniac-Ravings and The Corsican Pest, operate at a considerably lower level. Gross conceptions finely executed, they perform their cheap trick with unmistakable gusto: Napoleon stamping the ground in a rage like Rumpelstiltskin (his angry jig has punctured another globe with a hole in the vicinity of Cape Horn); or again, Napoleon the ...”

“... persons using the present tense: ‘I do take thee, Bridget, for my wife’; ‘I do take thee, John, for my husband.’ Henry Swinburne, whose Treatise of Spousals was published in 1686 but written a century earlier, is clear that such a contract, without solemnisation, without consummation, constitutes valid, indissoluble marriage. To marry privately in ...”