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“... and offering uniform, centrally managed retail outlets whose contents were the same from Bismarck, North Dakota to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In these glistening malls, Waldenbooks or B. Dalton had to pay the same high rents as the shops next door, Florsheim’s Shoes or Miller’s Outpost. This meant high volume, fast turnover. The chains aren’t interested in ...”

“... Darcy’s income can hardly be untainted by slavery. But emerging from his pond and confronting Elizabeth, the TV Darcy, clad only, and by his own choice, in a fetching shirt, is exempt from that description, unless the scriptwriter can be said to have commodified him. The Austens, though not rich themselves, had connections in the world of London ...”

“... than a million, at the age of 91. And the oldest person in Britain was also among the richest. Elizabeth Ramsden died in 1817, worth £140,000, at the age of 106. The average age at death of the whole adult population was probably 50 at most. In Britain 200 years ago, the more you got the longer you lived; and the longer you lived the more you got. This ...”

“... Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, was to bring ‘Western Civilisation’ to the simple parts of North America, and from there to the even simpler parts of the Orient. In 1887 the Earl of Harrowby reported that the railroad was ‘perhaps the greatest revolution in the condition of the British empire that had occurred in our time ... It had brought the ...”

“... on their 1773 tour of the Hebrides, or Pablo Fanque (a.k.a. William Darby), the acrobat and North of England circus proprietor. We still don’t know how successfully black people integrated with their local communities in towns like Leicester, Greenock and Newcastle. Gerzina writes attractively and avoids the kind of jargon that mars much literary and ...”

“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... in the language and so persisted in using ‘th’ instead whenever possible. Speaking of the North Wind he writes ‘Gold and snow he mixeth in spite’, without apparently realising that the archaism merely makes the line difficult to say. It presents, in fact, the same trap as does ‘The Leith police dismissed us’ which was once allegedly used to ...”

“... He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been written, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (published in 1979 and abridged as The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe in 1983). Eisenstein argued – though less insistently than Johns’s criticisms might suggest – that one ...”

“... as chief complainer but made a strong early showing as the ranking literary man, publishing The North Ship (1945), Jill (1946) and A Girl in Winter (1947) before he was 26. Amis seems to have taken this in his stride, being more absorbed by the many sexual opportunities that came his way even as a junior academic. Larkin got on well with Amis’s first ...”

“... moment in Bleak House is not the trial’s conclusion, but trooper George Rouncewell’s journey north to Sheffield, in Chapter 63, to seek out his brother, a self-made man and owner of a vast iron foundry. George’s first look at the foundry is a look straight through the solid ontology of what exists to the possibilities of economic and social ...”

“... novel, and then his second novel. Eventually they did print his short stories. He was living in North London. He was married, probably being kept by his wife, who was a teacher. I edited his books and we became great friends. The other thing that bore fruit during my time at Deutsch was the Jean Rhys saga. I’d always thought her books were wonderful. I ...”

“... man. For him Philby and Co are the modern equivalents of heroic Jesuit priests plotting against Elizabeth. In Le Carré’s world the dingy agents of the KGB and MI6 are interchangeable. Who can forget A.J.P. Taylor’s jibe that no spy ever told his masters anything of value they could not have gleaned from the press? Or Malcolm Muggeridge’s chronicles ...”

“... followed, his was still the third most cited name in the American press, behind Ronald Reagan and Elizabeth Taylor. He went on to advise presidents of all stripes, commanded huge fees on Wall Street, was lionised in China and feted by publishers. This has continued into his late nineties. Kissinger has always liked to draw a historical parallel from the first ...”

“... hardly at all. In his youth he had the courage of his unconcern: Nobly Cape Saint Vincent to the north-west died away; Sunset ran, one glorious blood-red, reeking into Cadiz Bay; Bluish mid the burning water, full in face Trafalgar lay; In the dimmest north-east distance, dawned Gibraltar grand and gray; ‘Here and here ...”

“... mortality pattern of the period appears to lie within the systems covered by the Princeton North tables. Another problem patch is the 17th-century Interregnum, for replacement of ecclesiastical by secular registration created its own problems of under-recording. Some of the adjustments made are fairly arbitrary: in 17th-century London, plague ...”