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“... architects is essentially a list (Meades likes lists) of refined barbarians. The pantheon contains John Vanbrugh, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, S.S. Teulon, William Butterfield, Frederick Pilkington, Dominikus and Gottfried Böhm, Claude Parent, Rodney Gordon, Richard Rogers (in his Gothic moods), Zaha Hadid. Sometimes, as with the Communist emulator of the style of ...”

“... he devoted a great deal of his later imaginative effort precisely to not sounding like he used to. John Bayley, an attentive but sceptical admirer, once shrewdly said of the early Hill manner: ‘The danger with this sort of poetry is that it is the kind that looks like poetry, which need not mean that it is not the real thing, but is bound to raise a certain ...”

“... caught any of Alan Bennett’s Westminster Abbey footage? Bennett, required to audition for the John Betjeman slot, couldn’t bring himself to deliver much more than formulaic world-weariness, a drone like a miraculously articulate David Hockney impersonator. Jonathan Meades does this schtick so much better, performs himself with lip-smacking ...”

“... to what other writers were doing about the war. In 1943, after reading a story about the army by John Cheever in the New Yorker, he wrote to Mackie: ‘The trouble with writing a story about the army is this: people expect something to happen in a story (Cheever supplied things, lots of things); but the whole point of the army is that nothing ever does ...”

“... a panel. He was not in sympathy with the craft-based medievalism of the direct heirs of Ruskin and Morris in the Arts and Crafts movement: he employed joiners and fabric printers to carry out the artists’ designs, and had no objection to second-hand furniture being bought in for painting-up. But attention is not being given to Omega simply because it has ...”

“... even in a world where couples get to know each other first. Hilda Thomas and Thomas James Meredith-Morris, back then in decorous 19 –, wouldn’t have been very well acquainted. In that, of course, they were simply figures of their generation. What made their marriage more than a run-of-the-mill case of domestic estrangement was her refusal to accept her ...”

“... Zionism by a new generation of Israeli historians – among them Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim and Benny Morris – whose work is now entering the mainstream. In a sense, by focusing on the Mandate, Ploughing Sand and One Palestine, Complete are considerations of Israel’s debt to the British and Britain’s injury to the Arabs. Shepherd writes that ‘British rule ...”

“... of silence. I was recently struck by this relationship of music to silence when I saw the Mark Morris Dance Group perform ‘Neue Liebeslieder Walzer’ to the music of Brahms. At the end of the work, when the dance has subsided into a circular tableau of figures sleeping in the shadows, at the precise moment when the sound of the last note is about to ...”

“... retrospective in 2000, contains additional valuable information and perspective; of note are Maria Morris Hambourg’s reading of the development of Evans’s early aesthetic sense and Jeff Rosenheim’s detailed study of Evans’s work in the South. Taken together, these contributions work to fill in the vague outlines of one of the most important American ...”

“... the dreams that attached themselves to him. In choosing ‘a well-rounded life’ as his subtitle, John Campbell risks some obvious jibes about his increasingly portly subject, but he delivers on its promise. It is a persuasive, if at times indulgent, portrait of a life rich in satisfactions. At its heart were a long, close marriage and three children, to ...”

“... the private sector sets aside for corporate sheen, although it does have a museum dedicated to John Charnley, who, almost half a century ago, pioneered the popular benchmark of the NHS’s success or failure, the hip replacement operation. They still do hips at Wrightington, and knees, and elbows, and shoulders. They deal with joint problems that are too ...”

“... fighting for an approving glance from their favourite teacher. Barclay turns to Desmond Morris to explain what is going on here, citing the Chelsea players’ body language as evidence that some profound human forces are at work – not just ‘respect’, not just ‘camaraderie’, but something like ‘love’. This may be overstating ...”

“... Lada. Was making cars once an indicator of national self-sufficiency? Is it still? Rover, Morris, Austin, Triumph, Vauxhall, Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce, Mini, Land Rover: when we hear the names of these firms, we think of the cars they made, and of cars driven by parents or grandparents, sisters or old boyfriends. But we also think of the places in ...”

“... which has been awaiting repair for many months. Inside, rampaging grandchildren zoom about. A keen Morris dancer with a countryman’s voice, he was largely responsible for Chevaline, the naval update of Polaris in the Seventies. As I talked to him, he sat by his fire enjoying the fact that he seems more like Falstaff than Dr Strangelove. But when he talks ...”

“... anchorite St Alphege, who in Rees-Mogg’s exegesis was England’s first tax martyr; and John Locke, whom he characterised with cynical vagueness as a champion of the people against government. That speech set the key for his parliamentary excursions into history and literature, armed with the kind of cute patriotic simpleness one might have found in ...”