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“... down through the South-West and the South, back to New York and New England. The Bowery dance hall, Niagara Falls and Grand Canyon as tourist attractions, the segregated South, the college campus – these are the springboards for her efforts to comprehend the deep structure of the American world. A left-wing Tocqueville, she is struck by the paradox of ...”

“... Horden colliery closed in 1986, though the union committee meets every Wednesday in the Miners’ Hall to process death benefit and compensation claims. The Big Club, Horden’s ‘legendary workingmen’s club’, turns out to be virtually shut up, save for a doorman levying a toll of tenpence a time to deter non-existent visitors, and a dwindling band of ...”

“... what he has accomplished. 24 February. To a Faber meeting for their sales reps at the Butchers’ Hall, which is just by the back door of Barts, bombed presumably and rebuilt in undistinguished neo-Georgian some time in the 1960s. Doorman sullen and no advertisement for the supposed cheerfulness of the butchering profession. Early so have a chance to look at ...”

“... John Seely, Lord Mottistone. In spirit, if not detail, it is heir to Colen Campbell’s Ebberston Hall near Scarborough: sprightly and miles away from Office of Works Georgian, RAF Neo-Georgian, War Office Georgian.Perhaps the Architecture of the Modern Age had already arrived. It was there for all to see in the Germany of the Weimar republic: glass and ...”

“... had the kind of peacefulness that ancientness alone can bestow – the young men walked the hall knowing the world they walked in possessed the texture of meditation and martyrdom, of prayers uttered and strong beliefs confirmed. Yet round the corner in the Campo de’ Fiori, the statue of Giordano Bruno stands high above a modern centre of bar ...”

“... cancer that were diagnosed a few years after he quit. One of Beckett’s best discoveries is Dr Richard Stone, whose father, Joe Stone, had been Wilson’s GP since the 1940s – a job that the junior Stone took over for the last 12 years of Wilson’s life. ‘Harold had been the master of the detail, and then he didn’t have the detail,’ ...”

“... the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit about House of Lords reform. As I sit quietly in the entrance hall, there suddenly irrupt, stride past, and disappear through the front door Major Ashdown and his little platoon of MPs – shoulders squared, eyes front, chins thrust forward, as if on their way to a Royal Marine assault course. Next appears Robin Cook, who ...”

“... we drifted away from the stage I saw something else. I glanced sideways into a room off the main hall, and saw that it was full of stacking chairs. It was a depressing, institutional, impersonal sight. I thought, Charles must see this all the time. Glance sideways, into the wings, and you see the tacky preparations for the triumphant public event. You see ...”

“... that a poet must be either in the canon or not in it – poets such as John Clare, Thomas Hood, Richard Corbett, Henry Carey, and pre-eminently Christina Rossetti. Paulin has some inspired choices from her, alive to her inspiration in such very different poems as ‘I caught a little ladybird’ and ‘The Iniquity of the Fathers upon the Children’. This ...”

“... loyal to jazz since the Thirties, and The Duke Ellington Reader is worth its price simply for Richard Boyer’s magnificent profile of the great man (‘The Hot Bach’), which first appeared there in 1944. It is safe to say that, at that time, in no American city outside New York would nightclubs like Café Society, militantly devoted to the social ...”

“... talent is as much a tribute to the post-war grammar school as it is to the wonders of Little Richard. Brought up by the bookish and financially comfortable Aunt Mimi, Lennon was shaped by the conflicts of the bright working-class kid in the grammar crammer. Selected to make social progress and clearly intellectually able, he instead devoted almost his ...”

“... black women: ‘the clothes on those sisters, the way those black women floated into the banquet hall like glittering birds of paradise spelled sable to him, sable beauty.’ Later, they begin to feel an inverted snobbery against these rich people. ‘The soft strains of a slow waltz drifted through the doors and Willie made a mental bet that they’d dance ...”

“... murder, it’s time to sell everything you have. ‘Have you been saving up for a rainy day?’ Richard Gere as the defence attorney asks in Primal Fear. ‘Guess what? It’s raining.’ In the course of his many appeals, Stafford Smith claimed that Maharaj had received ‘ineffective assistance at trial’, but though Hendon had been lousy, legally he ...”

“... into ‘sixpence’ without any conscious translation. Even a single word could be macaronic: the hall screens appear in one Cambridge record as leskreneum, a French article plus an English (though perhaps French-derived) substantive with a Latin ending. The surviving record of such language mixture is inevitably a written record. We have no evidence of how ...”

“... politely inquired: ‘Do you wish to pass me on the left or on the right?’ The incident, which Richard Boston recounts in his biographical memoir of Lancaster, captures something essential about a man who, as a cartoonist and writer excelled in capturing types, human and architectural, yet himself remained hard to typify. Georgian (Town) Pillar to ...”