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“... movies and now the video footage. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was working on the life of David O. Selznick, the man who produced Gone with the Wind, Rebecca and Duel in the Sun. It was a great help, yet a daunting obstacle, that Selznick had kept virtually every bit of paper that passed through his office. But the family archive had other ...”

“... and the Rothschilds at Waddesdon and Halton were but the most spectacular of these nouveaux riches builders. Significantly, the last great English country-house architect, Edwin Lutyens, built much more for the new rich than for the old. Middleton Park in Oxfordshire in 1936 for the Earl of Jersey is a late exception; Castle Drogo, his masterpiece in ...”

“... queen’. As the visible embodiment of stultifying tradition, obscurantist snobbery, unearned riches, hereditary privilege, vested interests, paternalistic decency and patrician wetness, the crown and its court exemplify many of the attitudes which Mrs Thatcher most vehemently detests. And as the successful leader of the nation in arms (remember the ...”

“... bars by a factor of 400 just so that the remaining uncertainties can be made visible on the page. David Weintraub’s new book, How Old Is the Universe?, captures the spirit of this post-lonely-hearts era. Weintraub, an astronomer at Vanderbilt University, offers a patient tour of the new data-rich landscape. Where Overbye had focused on the outsized ...”

“... the outsider,’ and his book abounds in stories of the nasty things that could happen to nouveaux riches or ‘foreigners’ from other parts of England when they were in too much of a hurry to exploit their new estates. In one Staffordshire village a greedy farmer found that his neighbours had destroyed his grass by driving their hay-wains four abreast ...”

“... recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress. One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention.* His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early ...”

“... to Solomon, ‘for he had heard, that they had anointed him king in the room of his father,’ David: For Hiram was ever a lover of David. And Solomon sent to Hiram, saying: thou knowest how that David my father could not build an house unto the name of the Lord his God, for the wars ...”

“... be extracted only with the deploying of more sophisticated methods. A sample of the new layer of riches that we can expect to be yielded up to us as a result is provided by these two volumes. The Tradescants, father and son, have long been renowned as the founding fathers of the museum profession in Britain, but that they were also the founding fathers of ...”

“... people – the visual embodiment of their sense of urban community, the physical witness to its riches and renown, and the symbolic expression of pride in its past, confidence in its present, and faith in its future. Ever since Asa Briggs’s celebrated essay on the building of Leeds town hall in his Victorian Cities (1963), the need for a detailed study of ...”

“... In a characteristically versatile display of cultural, technological and economic history, David Landes looks at the evolution of the clock as a machine, and at the triumph of public time as a discipline. And in an exceptionally wide-ranging foray into intellectual history, Stephen Kern explores the ways in which private notions of time (and ...”

“... clear as it might at first seem.This, historically, is a unique state of affairs. Until now, most riches have been based on real assets of land or trade – often inherited rather than created ex novo, but no less real for that. This new form of riches is based on gambling. What does it mean about us that we reward so ...”

“... influence on the generations that followed. Following Osborne’s death in 1994, however, David Hare, among others, leaped to the playwright’s defence, in his memorial eulogy and a longer lecture first delivered in 2002 and repeated on the stage of the Royal Court on the 50th anniversary of Look Back in Anger’s opening. Now John Heilpern has taken ...”

“... undermine enthusiasm for any political or social virtues the Revolution might possess. The result, David Bindman writes in his excellent catalogue of the exhibition, was ‘to establish in British consciousness, in place of the myriad complexities of the real French Revolution, a series of simple pictures and stereotypes which have proved virtually ...”

“... AD’, but that, in its very essence, time was now ‘man-made’ and ‘man-co-ordinated’. From David Landes’s work we know that in exactly the same year in which the Thirteen Colonies declared their Independence, London’s Gentlemen’s Magazine included this brief obituary for John Harrison: ‘He was the most ingenious mechanic, and received the ...”

“... South Africa through a European-style industrial revolution compressed into twenty years. David Goldblatt (b.1930) began taking photographs in the gold-mining areas in his teens. Many of them, and the ones that followed, tell the story of South Africa’s labouring classes, predominantly black, in a world shaped by race laws and extractive ...”