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“... substance that turns out to be calves’ lights (the gastronomic delicacy made from the lungs of young cows); statue, trolley and rails are in turn mounted on a platform bearing the inscription DUAL, followed by a bracket and two forms of an ancient Greek verb. When a carefully trained magpie activates an internal spring with its beak, the platform slowly ...”

“... of rhetorical questions and ‘who can knows’. Things brighten for the reader as soon as the young Edwin Lutyens appears. The collaboration between architect and gardener was central to both careers and Sally Festing adds to the growing perception that, at least to begin with, Lutyens owed more to his ‘Aunt Bumps’ than has sometimes been ...”

“... Parthenon. It isn’t clear that the journey to Arezzo was made by many British artists. But the young Edgar Degas went there in the summer of the very year that Layard’s article appeared. Soon afterwards, Degas began his large canvas (now in the Musée d’Orsay) of Semiramis Directing the Building of Babylon. The gracious but rigid pose of the Queen and ...”

“... in 1354, Sultan Abu Inan was so impressed with his tales that he commissioned Ibn Juzayy, a young Andalusian scholar Ibn Battutah had met four years before in Granada, to transcribe them. The Rihlah (‘Travels’) represented, in its length and complexity, the apogee of a genre then flourishing in North Africa. It is still a defining text in the ...”

“... and several more besides. In August 1873, writing to one of his favourite correspondents, Edma Roger des Genettes, he claimed that since the previous September he had read and made notes on 194 titles, and his final estimate was that he had consulted some 1500 in all – a research curriculum the like of which can seldom if ever have crossed the mind of ...”

“... a novelist who will tell you, as she does in Sylvia’s Lovers, what kinds of shoes and stockings young girls wore in the late 18th century, or that smugglers on the coast near Whitby were helped by farmers on the bluffs to haul up illegal goods hidden in buckets of seaweed. Gaskell’s elaboration of details about places and households can give a clearer ...”

“... Federal Army, though illness prevented him fighting for the other side. He now persuaded two other young men to accompany him on a voyage to Turkey. The younger one, the 17-year-old Lewis Noe, he subjected to all kinds of humiliations, finally tying him to a tree on some flimsy pretext and whipping him till the blood ran. Worse things would happen to the ...”

“... never to return. He tried other ways of securing his manuscript, which included entrusting it to a young Englishman, Brooke Boothby, whom he had known in Derbyshire. It was he who published a version of the first Dialogue in Lichfield, after Rousseau’s death, but it was not until 1958 that the complete work appeared in Paris. It was because he was ...”

“... published since the war, but I hope to do better than that. It will, I hope, be the story of a young man of the 20th century and his Muse, his dazzling, dancing, fascinating mistress. I owe it to my cock-teasing mistress to get it all down. Much that is attractive about Powell, and a good deal of what makes his compatriots occasionally shy away from ...”

“... orientation. In this context, Malise Ruthven’s journey – which begins at the tomb of Roger Williams (the founder of Providence, Rhode Island), takes in memorials to Brigham Young, Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton, and ends at the grave of Thomas Jefferson – has a distinctly antiquarian flavour. Ruthven ...”

“... and both had ways of speaking that were not only rapid but might have been thought affected. Both young men were socially successful but Ayer was more flamboyant and far more likely to put people off. They were friends but not close, for the difference between their temperaments was great; for example, Ayer was uninterested in his Jewishness, while Berlin of ...”

“... if he does not love me, he would not help me.’ Good works are becoming synonymous with charity. Roger Crab put another difficult question: ‘if the elect are chosen from all eternity, what do priests take our money for?’ With such ideas about, no wonder the Westminster Assembly preferred Beza and Perkins to the Calvin whom Cotton had embraced. But ...”

“... oral history ward. If the old identify too closely with the ideas and emotions of the past, the young have difficulty in understanding them at all. If their politics descend from the radicalism of the 1970s, they find the assumptions of someone like Attlee or Bevin antiquated and hard to explain historically. How could a left-wing government have invested ...”

“... a real lady. She did not, though Forman said she would, but thanks to Rowse and to his informant Roger Prior, she has become sufficiently famous after her death to make up for her failure to become a lady in life. Rowse found another Shakespearian connection who had consulted Forman: the wife of a French wig-maker in Silver Street in London, Mrs ...”

“... working on episodes of Z Cars, found allies in the Wednesday Play’s script editor and producer, Roger Smith and Tony Garnett. ‘What we realised,’ Loach said, ‘was that social democrats and Labour politicians were simply acting on behalf of the ruling class, protecting the interests of capital.’ No sooner had he identified a politically receptive ...”