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“... wayside crosses and holy trees, like the miraculous Glastonbury Thorn that flowered on Christmas Day. The Puritan preacher Hugh Peter wanted to pull down Stonehenge, and the 18th-century Baptist Thomas Robinson boasted that he had ‘killed’ 40 stones at Avebury with his own hands. But, like the radicals who proposed that all churches and cathedrals should ...”

“... the Antarctic, once watched a colony of fulmars on Fair Isle for 56 days on the trot, 18 hours a day, only to find the species relatively faithful: a mere 16 per cent of females had sex with a bird who wasn’t their partner, and there were no ‘illegitimate’ chicks. This isn’t a glamorous pursuit. Geoff Parker, one of the human heroes of Birkhead’s ...”

“... the knell of the old order. Fresnay has earlier realised, as von Stroheim will not, that the day of his caste is over, but there is no easy message here. Later viewers have been keen to insist, as Célia Bertin does in her biography, on Renoir’s ‘horizontal’ view of the world, where class means more than nationality. It’s true that Renoir thought ...”

“... man: he would drive around on a Vespa wearing a white paisa poncho and cheap hair tonic. One day he noticed Henao in the street and started sending her gifts – chocolate bars, romantic albums, a pearl ring. By the time she was 15, they were married.The Henaos grudgingly accepted their new son-in-law, but they weren’t happy about it. Her mother asked ...”

“... wrote to Asquith, ‘than sending our armies to chew barbed wire in Flanders?’ This is quoted in Robin Prior’s excellent Gallipoli: The End of the Myth, whose conclusion is that that whole enterprise was hopeless from the start; the ‘myth’ in the subtitle is the common illusion that if things had gone a little differently it might have succeeded, and ...”

“... men in big glasses chop-chop-chopping with a chisel until a perfect mortice joint emerged. ‘Fine day, Mr Aikman. Everybody satisfied wi’ the boat? No a great looker, but she doesnae have to be. This your grandson? Great-nephew. You want tae be a shipbuilder too, son.’ The sense of a command in that, most of a lifetime ago. The Grangemouth Dockyard was ...”

“... anti-Soviet poet Georgy Ivanov – Irma Kudrova’s biography of Tsvetaeva will see the light of day. In the meantime, there are biographies of Tsvetaeva in languages other than Russian. In 1981, Maria Razumovsky, the Viennese translator of Tsvetaeva’s poetry, brought out Marina Zwetajewa: Mythos und Wahrheit, a study of the poet’s life. In 1983, an ...”

“... and travel providing most of the plot-line, and only the odd puzzle or mystery to liven up the day. Sixteen-year-old Nancy Drew, who made her literary debut in 1929, was the first real sleuth in the series books. Even in 1933, in the depths of the Depression, Macy’s sold six thousand Nancy Drews at Christmas, and they had sold sixty million copies ...”

“... what has been written in Ireland and Scotland in the Gaelic language, even up to the present day. The scholastic monotonies of the arguments can easily be taken as an indication of the unreality of the whole issue. Gaelic, Erse, Hiberno-English, Anglo-Irish, Irish are but part of the terminological spume that plays about the ghostly paradigm of political ...”

“... employers. It’s all very satisfying to English amour propre, with the English yeomanry (perhaps Robin Hood was there) showing their superiority, and the dastardly and deeply undemocratic French cavaliers revealing their contempt for mere foot soldiers, even on their own side.This is probably nothing more than a piece of post-battle scapegoating and one that ...”

“... studies, its sympathy with poets, translators, excitable theorists, its egalitarianism. Robin Blackburn on slavery, Angela Livingstone on Tsvetaeva, Ernesto Laclau’s charismatic mystifications. Dawn Ades’s work on Latin America inspired artists from all over the continent to donate paintings and sculpture, so it has a collection unrivalled by ...”

“... heart of a heartless world’. A History Workshop meeting on ‘Popular Romance from Robin Hood to Mills and Boon’ was right up my street. Raphael was there, sitting on the floor in the packed main hall of Ruskin College where he taught adult students, amid dozens of historians from both inside and outside the university. He looked like the ...”

“... the coldest winter for years’); the frequent cut-away for exposition or meditation (‘The late Robin Williams, in his role as the inspirational English teacher in Dead Poets Society, has his pupils gather round a faded photo… “Carpe diem, boys”’), then the cutting back; the cameos (‘At the junction of Fitzroy Road and Chalcot Road we meet the ...”

“... on the subject and some have been no less alarmed by what they have seen in the chapel itself. Robin Richmond’s Michelangelo and the Creation of the Sistine Chapel is a popular introduction which will rightly enrage anyone who has been alarmed. ‘I grew up in Rome and was so familiar with Michelangelo that I never questioned whether his work looked now ...”

“... happened behind the scenes in September 2015. The most compelling account is Die Getriebenen by Robin Alexander, a correspondent for the conservative paper Die Welt. He was given intimate access to Merkel’s entourage, and offers an unsparing portrait of the German political class as it struggled to cope with the crisis, largely by refusing to take ...”