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“... of the 19th century and medical stories about its causes were both unstable and resonant. Ian Miller’s book begins at a point of rapid change in the scientific understanding of how the stomach functioned in health and disease and breaks off – unfortunately – short of the more recent changes brought about by the surprising discovery in the early ...”

“... which allowed for his probably quite numerous affairs, particularly his long relationship with Ian Fleming’s wife, Ann – certainly the Gaitskells often dined with one or both Flemings, making one wonder quite what the mutual understandings were. Ann Fleming was a wealthy Tory – she had been married to Lord Rothermere – and while there is no ...”

“... investigating the realities of bishops’ power in the Auvergne of the sixth and seventh centuries Ian Wood’s mastery of the evidence and strong sense of place permit him to follow a slow tracking-shot of the hills and cornfields around Clermont with a sudden zoom in on figures like the priest Epachius, ‘notable as a senator and as an alcoholic’. This ...”

“... is (was?) a particularly dangerous nuisance. ‘The good news is the crackdown in Poland,’ Ian Davidson wrote in the Financial Times. ‘General Jaruzelski’s intervention, however deplorable in many ways, nevertheless offers the last faint hope for the reform movement in Poland.’ At the same time it is often conceded that for real stability to be ...”

“... day, was injured by the pamphlets of Wise and Forman? Least of all the authors they revered. As Ian Hayward points out in his study of the politics of forgery, Faking it (1987), ‘T. J. Wise’s crime was wholly bibliographical. He tampered with the book-making operation ... He did not tamper with the text in any way. He made no intrusions into the ...”

“... and Gentlemen. It is a scene Feigel might have quoted at more length, in which Guy Crouchback and Ian Kilbannock stand in Piccadilly during an air-raid, arguing about whether the night sky, riven with fire and the beams of searchlights, is more like a Turner or a John Martin. Further down St James’s Street, on the opposite pavement from where a club that is ...”

“... of the Commons and its contemptuous disregard of the Lords have allowed it singlehandedly to turn Britain into the impoverished and unequal nation that it now finds itself to be. If it is the recent explosion of personal baseness that middle England has now finally noticed, then we should be thankful that they have noticed anything at all. The grasping ...”

“... Lanka is historically one of the most cosmopolitan places on earth, a centre of civilisation when Britain was a distinctly unsceptred isle. Today, you will hardly want to sail around India without putting in at the island (and people have been sailing around India ever since sailing began). Its inhabitants were converted to Buddhism 2500 years ago; when the ...”

“... German – man, woman, child, cow, sheep, dog, cat, flea and mite. Soon after the war, chemists in Britain managed to produce stuff ten times crueller than sarin, and these more lethal substances became the core of the US and British nerve gas arsenal. (The UK seems long to have been a leader in the field.) Perhaps the German high command should not have ...”

“... histories in later life. And, in time, their story of triumph became the nation’s too. Few in Britain mourned the world that was lost after the slave trade was ended in 1807 and slavery in the empire in 1834. The country’s collective economic and political investment in slavery receded from public memory, as did the role played by its many defenders and ...”

“... but he still managed to get the infamous Section 31 passed, the Republic’s prefiguring of Britain’s broadcasting ban. (Section 31 was allowed to lapse earlier this year.) This is not a liberal man. His present pessimism is, one suspects, the disillusionment of someone whose self-promoted wisdom is foolishly no longer heeded by those in charge. The ...”

“... the inhibition against gentleness – or the ‘taboo on tenderness’, as the psychiatrist Ian Suttie called it. There are much ‘naughtier’ words on the blackboard, but it is the naming of the female breast that causes the boy difficulty, presumably because it recalls him to the most intimate and dependent relationship he has ever been in, and from ...”

“... Shell Haven, which will be the largest in Europe. But who cares about the most derided county in Britain, except those in the stockade? Most visitors to Essex are only passing through, heading for somewhere else. You can see that from the way the roads have been arranged. The M11 makes its way towards Cambridge, shortening the journey to desirable north ...”

“... eventually set up a separate union, the Union of Democratic Mineworkers. The Scottish-American Ian MacGregor, appointed head of the National Coal Board, was clear that ‘the key to the whole strike was Nottinghamshire and its 31,000 miners. If we could keep this vast and prosperous coalfield going, then I was convinced, however long it took, we could ...”

“... misspells the heroine’s name.Waugh has been called ‘the most influential reviewer of novels in Britain today’. That was when he did a weekly star-turn in the Evening Standard. Now he does it in the Mail, and nothing has changed. John Osborne at present occupies the New Standard spot. Nothing has changed there either. Osborne promises to be almost as ...”