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“... Children in Bow had to sleep in their classrooms. Thousands of empty cars were left blocking the North Circular. The Duchess of Kent was unable to reach her flight at Stansted; the prime minister failed to get to a dinner at the Savoy. A monkey got lost in Oxford Street, and a Slavonian grebe – trying to migrate without sight of ground or stars – made a ...”

“... a new group of women whom they called ‘radical suffragists’ and who lived and worked in the North of England, the cradle of the movement. Like the remarkable Selina Cooper, a Lancashire mill-girl from ‘Red’ Nelson, whose biography Liddington has also written, these women canvassed for the vote at the factory gate and on doorsteps, especially in the ...”

“... The conquest​ of most of the North American continent by Anglophone settlers took roughly three hundred years, from the first stake at Jamestown to the last bullet at Wounded Knee. The Spanish had subdued a much vaster population of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Peru in just under half a century and expected to repeat the formula, mobilising the Indigenous tributaries against the Indigenous core as they moved up from their outposts in Florida, only to find there was no power centre to replace ...”

“... ready to ask a question. ‘Fifteen years ago,’ he wrote in 1966, ‘the English hardly credited North America with having any poetry at all; but they are now, it turns out, ready to accept all and any American poetry.’ In an interview, published at the end of Shelf Life, his latest collection of essays and criticism, he mentions that ‘the ...”

“... the Tudor demesne of Richmond to create a landscape garden: a cave with wax statues of Merlin and Elizabeth I suggested the culmination of Arthurian prophecy in the Hanoverian monarchy. Frederick Louis, Caroline’s unpopular son, and his wife Augusta attempted to rival this display, planning a Mount of Parnassus, a House of Confucius and a Physic Garden. But ...”

“... with many opinions married to a successful businessman. (Florence’s mother has been a friend of Elizabeth David and is a friend of Iris Murdoch.) Both stories are set at a very precise date, with debates about socialism, Britain’s decline as a world power, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Both works exude a sense, alive in McEwan’s work since ...”

“... with enthusiasm for Comte’s ideas, and the same was true in much of late 19th-century Europe and North America. That enthusiasm often waned as Comte’s doctrines were more fully understood (most famously in the case of John Stuart Mill, whose early admiration for Comte’s phenomenalism and rationality gradually gave way to revulsion at his ...”

“... then, still convalescent from illness, only because of an aberrant desire to meet the young Queen Elizabeth during her tour of the Antipodes in 1954. She charmed him. Stricken by remorse for a lifetime of stiffnecked pride, he dragged himself again from his sickbed on the following Sunday to seek forgiveness at the nearest church. He died from a stroke within ...”

“... into’ or the progress from eiders to eiderdown. Such lines and shorelines bring to mind Elizabeth Bishop, littered as they are with correspondences – a turtle like ‘a covered wagon’ or the ocean ‘wrinkling like tinfoil’. She lays the paint on more thickly than Bishop: but can she rise to the grandiloquence of ‘At the Fishhouses’? At ...”

“... and law court methods) of crimes against property. ‘Pitiful necessity’ was often the cause. Elizabeth Beckford, at 70 the second oldest woman aboard, had been given – or rather robbed of – seven years for stealing 12 pounds of Gloucester cheese. Her senior was a vendor of rags and old clothes, aged 82, who was to be Australia’s first suicide. But ...”

“... placed under the secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. JSOC operators provided cover for oil tankers operated by US allies in the Gulf and for US installations in Lebanon, sabotaged petroleum facilities in Iran, invaded Grenada, Panama, Somalia and Afghanistan, and were the ‘tip of the spear’ in ...”

“... we ended up going back to Leeds where we now lived in Headingley, with the local public library on North Lane, a visit to which could be combined with seeing the film at the Lounge cinema opposite. I went to Leeds Modern School, a state school at Lawnswood (and now called Lawnswood). I spoke there a few months ago and, unlike Ofsted, was much impressed by ...”

“... Ramsbotham had suffered a nervous breakdown and went absent without leave, taking himself off to North Cornwall where, after a month or two, Reed joined him. Later both men were recalled to the Service. Reed, adopting Nelson’s tactics, declined to see the signal, and the Navy let the matter drop. Ramsbotham was posted to the staff of the ...”

“... his preferred Neo-Romantic illustrators, Keith Vaughan and John Minton excelled. Minton decorated Elizabeth David’s first book, A Book of Mediterranean Food with tipsy Breton sailors, market girls, lobster pots, fruits de mer, as a kind of delicious ballet in and out of the dedicated text. As Wright says, when you take up a book published by Lehmann you get ...”

“... to Mason, much of Britain’s early supply of sugar, priced ‘unimaginably high’, came from North Africa, and was used as spice, medicine or preservative. Medieval banquets of the kind at which the jester jumped into the custard bowl boasted pyramids of sweetmeats of one sort or another. This book omits to tell us of the sugar spectacular at Elvetham ...”