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“... time and its beliefs: God, machines, money. Stations create ecosystems, a term coined in 1935 by Arthur Tansley, Sherardian Professor of Botany at the university. Park End Street and its continuation, New Road, used to be known as the ‘Street of Wheels’. The reference is to the garages and car dealerships that sprang up there in the 1930s. No one is ...”

“... mountains, the wild Pacific – and being treated for an hour to the story of Davis’s time as a young man in London, on the board of the New Left Review. It was definitely a funny story, but told with a Mark Twain, Yankee at the Court of King Arthur generosity. And of course I understood his laughter at my love of the ...”

“... Weegee, aka Arthur or Usher Fellig, invented a certain kind of photography. His pictures of New York street life – crime scenes, car wrecks, society girls, circus freaks, racegoers, rough sleepers, fire victims – were intimate and direct. He used a 4x5 Speed Graphic camera, preset for instant shooting to 1/200th of a second at f16 with a focal distance of ten feet ...”

“... secretary as he went down with the Titanic, though this is difficult to prove. The poet and critic Arthur Symons argued – in The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) – that shadowy flickers of worlds ‘unseen’ might be as real as the invisible ‘reality’ of the atom. The reign of the ‘material’ was over; now came the turn of a literature in ...”

“... were exclusive, but not too exclusive (unless you were of the wrong race or class): men and women, young and old, could play together, and flirt while they did so. If the tennis club was the main reason tennis entrenched itself as the chosen sport of middle-class professionals in the interwar years, what allowed it to become one of the most popular global ...”

“... and reassuringly familiar to its audience, each episode, according to its recent presenter Kirsty Young, ‘a well-tethered hammock’ cradling itself ‘around each highly individual guest’.For decades the famous and worthy, or would-be worthy, have queued up to appear on it. On his death in 1965, Herbert Morrison, Clement Attlee’s heir presumptive for ...”

“... ultimate crime of not being Margaret Thatcher’, and he became, in the words of the late Hugo Young, ‘a permanently contingent leader’. But he was not alone. Since Major no post-Thatcher Tory has been wholeheartedly accepted throughout the party as the legitimate leader of Conservatism. The rejection of Thatcher by her purported followers marks a ...”

“... the 1919 Exhibition of Modern French Art. Their snooty irreverence had made postwar England feel young again, so D.H. Lawrence is said to have said (although in making Osbert the model for Lord Chatterley, Lawrence may have been seeking to modify his celebration). In the social climate of the late Thirties, it was convenient to forget them, but they had done ...”

“... different reasons. For one thing, the Society recruited an extraordinary group of highly talented young men, perhaps peaking between 1890 and 1914, and it is impossible not to be interested in what Russell, Keynes, Lytton Strachey, E.M. Forster, Wittgenstein and G.E. Moore made of each other. For another thing, some of them had an extraordinary impact on the ...”

“... nearly half a million single women of marriageable age caught the public imagination. In the city young women seemed not to need a husband: they could live independently, work and socialise as they wished, go home with someone they met in the street. Newspapers and novels considered the new opportunities for urban romance: a man and woman might meet for a ...”

“... in that way too) she is a caricature of her generation. She says things like ‘when I was young and foolish’, ‘you young people’, ‘what is cancel culture?’ She endlessly harks back to her feminist heyday in the 1980s, when she was an actor; she refers to herself as ‘so menopausal’ when her memory fails ...”

“... deep shade, demoted to the background of the picture, their way barred by the crowded diggings. A young lady distributes tracts. A crazed herb-seller moves anxiously forward. Carlyle himself is there, on the sidelines, looking curiously furtive. Central to the picture is its heroine, her poised gesture reflecting that of the valiant workman who stands behind ...”

“... problems. Thus it was natural for him to jot down à propos of Chapter Five: ‘Bring in the other young couple. Yes ... Mixture of Oriental blood – or imperceptibly acquired nature – in them. Yes.’ But what the eventual destiny of Helena and Neville Landless was to be is for ever withheld. Unless he kept a secret second set of strategic plans we know ...”

“... where Ian Hamilton, editor of the New Review, was usually to be found. The suppliants, mostly young men not then long out of the universities, have very properly combined to congratulate the sage or gaffer on his 60th birthday.* Some of them got their first chance in that pub. A few of the celebrants are, or have been, English dons – John Fuller, Simon ...”

“... class of 30 12-year-old boys. Another English lesson: not Great Expectations this time, but Young Warriors by V.S. Reid. It is the first time the boys have seen the book, and there is a murmur of interest as the texts are handed out. ‘Who’s this geezer on the back?’ somebody asks. I explain that it’s a photo of the author. The ...”