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“... He was taken up by Maurice Bowra, and through him grew friendly with Kenneth Clark, John Sparrow, Henry Yorke, Alan Pryce-Jones, Osbert Lancaster, Robert Byron, Anthony Powell, Peter Quennell, Tom Driberg, Harold Acton, Christopher Sykes, Randolph Churchill, W.H. Auden, and lots of others, including Gaitskell once more (‘Hugh, may I stroke your ...”

“... Lectures upon the Fourth of John, a Bible and two books of sermons, as well as ribbons, gloves and green silk garters. A wedding was more than a private transaction: the banns were asked three times before the assembled congregation, seeking public endorsement for a proposed union. Marriages celebrated in private or without announcement were ...”

“... high as a room, requiring minutes to do multiplication, have worked? No one knows. Babbage’s son Henry built part of an Analytical Engine after his father’s death; for what the information is worth, it always tended to jam. Babbage did have some reason to be sensitive about government finance. The Difference Engine was funded to the tune of £17,000 under ...”

“... and Denis Rickett. Logan Pearsall Smith, aged 80, starts to tell a story of an American cousin of Henry James who ‘invited the novelist to sleep with him’ but he is overcome by a fit of coughing. By the end of the second page we have also met Kathleen Kennet, James Pope-Hennessy and Clarissa Churchill. And indeed we are little threatened by low ...”

“... cut into sheets. Early European paper bears the marks of this messy process. On a letter sent to Henry III by Berengaria of Castile sometime between 1217 and 1230, the oldest piece of paper to survive in an English archive, it’s still possible to make out the undissolved textile threads. Paper took its medieval European name from the papyrus of the ...”

“... beyond the vast majority of men.’ No story of social progress can account for the heroines in Henry James’s late novels. Their ambition is to be rich, and dress beautifully, and appear magnificent in company. So how is it that we can still sympathise with them? Instead of scheming to acquire a fortune, Kate Croy could train as a doctor or campaign for ...”

“... there’s one by Simon Bussy, drawn in 1904 (the year of Isherwood’s birth); there’s one by Henry Lamb, painted in 1914; there’s one by Dora Carrington from 1916. In Meade’s book, I was most struck by the following passage about a party in Los Angeles. (Parker, in addition to writing both poetry and fiction, not to mention reviews for the New ...”

“... call ‘nuts and bolts’. Sometimes they’ll think you’re long-winded and they’ll say, ‘Green 20 characters.’ ‘Greening’ is cutting. Oh, and by the way, don’t use words like ‘therefore’ and ‘thus’ and ‘aforesaid’ and ‘latter’ – sounds like school. I suppose the main thing is speed – saying the most in the fewest ...”

“... Along the narrow tarmac road linking Kabul to Kandahar you could be in New Mexico: green valleys, with scattered trees turning orange and yellow; clusters of adobe-style walled compounds; and looming above huge barren mountains and empty blue skies. This small road is one of the few signs of progress in an appallingly underdeveloped country; indeed, it is one of only very few paved roads in the whole of Afghanistan ...”

“... was other fare: in 1865 an ex-convict fondly remembered ‘capital dumplings … made with small green parrots, more common than sparrows’. Boyce sums up: Ordinary Britons in the early 19th century (and the Irish for much longer still) did not expect to have much in the way of possessions; meeting the essentials of life on a day-to-day basis was their ...”

“... of Ryan and the governor, Scott Walker; 80 per cent of the women among them oppose Trump. Around Green Bay the population is largely descended from immigrants from the Benelux countries, including the highest percentage of ethnic Belgians in the US, and they are moderates who reliably vote Republican. (Kessler was full of trivia: the town of Holland has ...”

“... besides, or in spite of, the ones they depict. This isn’t a new charge – even an admirer like Henry James thought Burne-Jones’s ‘languishing type … savours of monotony’ – but that hasn’t stopped reviewers of the Tate show serving up stale critique. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian called Burne-Jones ‘stupid’, while to Waldemar Januszczak of ...”

“... and Suffolk. They came through the disorder of the 15th century intact, swore allegiance to Henry Tudor, gained security of property and found knighthoods, seats in Parliament and minor positions at court. In the 16th century another Clement, a sea captain and courtier, built a great fortune from what was more or less piracy. The reckless strain in the ...”

“... Sea during the debates that immediately preceded the British-Irish Union. The Scottish politician Henry Dundas, an admirer of Smith and the prime mover behind the union, advanced an anti-feudalist rationale for British-Irish integration; and there were also echoes of Smith among Irish unionists, with Thomas Brook Clarke contending that it was only through ...”

“... Thomas Hardy to T.S. Eliot, not to speak of confrères such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke and Henry Newbolt. Ezra Pound, although savage in his denunciation of the use of idioms or phrases such as ‘dim lands of peace’ – locutions that abound in de la Mare – still found that on occasion volumes such as Peacock Pie or The Listeners truly hit the ...”