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“... a working-class audience. And there are two rather slighter essays on Trollope as a traveller and William Morris as a Victorian. But the two best pieces are on George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. In a study of Middlemarch, Briggs shows how Lydgate’s success as a doctor and failure as a medical reformer can only be understood with reference to the ...”

“... Is it opposed to a profound appearance? And is the writer contrasting narrow conventions with broad or loose ones? Douglas Cooper, in similar vein, tells us that the concern of Cubism was ‘the solid, tangible reality of things’, while John Golding, in a standard work on the subject, defines it as ‘the fusion of various views of a figure or an object ...”

“... Edward IV (1974) was, by contrast, highly readable. Ross, however, followed Scofield in corralling broad thematic concerns into discrete chapters at the end of his book. Such crucial topics as the crown’s relations with the nobility, governance, finance, trade and commerce, as well as chivalric and court life, were marginalised as a result, whereas Penn ...”

“... of ‘class hostility’ has lost its authority, historians have been able to relate them to broad patterns of intellectual upheaval, literary experiment and social experience. Though Como, like Hill, views political and religious affiliations alongside each other, he concentrates on the 1640s, the decade of civil war and political fragmentation, while ...”

“... with the preponderance of any particular metal. Nevertheless it is easy to see that there is a broad homology between the five successive forms of government, the four types of metal supposedly found within the souls of various social groups, and the threefold division of the individual soul into its rational, spirited and appetitive components. The ideal ...”

“... a taste seemingly guided by Gill and Epstein (not that he ever writes about them), he values a broad flat plane which has been incised with firm, frontally presented bodies or with devices that enhance its given texture. Thus stone may, in his metaphors, ‘disclose itself’ or ‘grow steadfastly’, emerging into ‘stone-blossom’. The ideal carver ...”

“... open-necked blue shirt – the anthropologist Humfry Gilbert Garth Payne, Stephen Spender and Sir William Walton. Conversely, almost all the women pictured in the book expose neck dimples, if not deep décolletage. Those who do not, whether the Duchess of Windsor in a triple-pearl choker, Dorothy Sayers in a mannish coat and tie or Margaret Thatcher in high ...”

“... has him mingling a few moments of scary, personal invention with lots of expansive coasting – broad, theatrical gestures towards the idea of a personality. But in the conversation he was working, and thinking. Coppola says, ‘The man is mad, Marlon, I mean his madness is our madness,’ to which Brando replies: I don’t think that he’s like Patton. I ...”

“... of sangfroid was intended to reassure his companions – while above them on Mount Vesuvius ‘broad sheets of fire and leaping flames blazed at several points, their bright glare emphasised by the darkness of night.’ Pliny went to bed, and could be heard snoring as the courtyard outside his room filled with volcanic ash. The others woke him ...”

“... carried, along with promos for George Davis and Reggie Kray, passengers from Dalston Junction to Broad Street: a lovely aerial view of industry, canal, domestic and commercial property, Shoreditch to City. You saw, precisely, where you were. For a token fee (often no fee), you became a privileged spectator. Now grander plans are afoot and we have the block ...”

“... Murdoch, most of it at some deep level boring because it is so much on one side or the other. William Shawcross surprised and disappointed many of his admirers by coming out as a big Murdoch fan in his 1992 biography. Bruce Page’s recent work, The Murdoch Archipelago, is as badly written as any book I have ever read, and is full of sentences which ...”

“... five squadrons to establish airfields in the land between the hills of the Asiago plateau and the broad valley of the Piave, and several airmen were also interred there. We were looking for the grave of a particular British pilot, Lieutenant Van Dyke Fernald, who was shot down at Godega, near Conegliano, in July 1918. He may have accidentally broken formation ...”

“... Near-East. They talk about Hittite Kings and the Citizens of Ur. From the window one can see broad-roofed Huguenot weaving-lofts outlined against Hawksmoor’s church. A mile or so beyond looms a larger sight that Rodinsky was spared: the 52 floors of Richard Seifert’s Natwest Tower, double-decker lifts, automatic window-washing facilities and ...”

“... saying to a Shadow Cabinet meeting on 31 July 1971, ‘the address on which my father’ – William Wedgwood Benn, a Liberal, then Labour MP, created Viscount Stansgate in 1941 – ‘fought the election in 1906: cheap food, reform and prosperity for the Port of London, freedom for the trade unions and justice for Ireland – and it doesn’t seem as if ...”

“... a hand upon them and would have been indignant if anyone had made the familiar imputation – as William Cory and Oscar Browning were at Eton when their open interest in good looks was rewarded by the headmaster’s request that they resign from the staff. Benson published Cory’s poems and translations (‘They told me, Heraclitus’), which, together with ...”