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“... Another pleasure of staying with the Glenconners was that they asked her what she would like to do and what she would like to eat. This was a luxury in a life that ran to a schedule drawn up by others, and which required her to make small talk with tongue-tied local notables while eating her way through the elaborate meals thought appropriate for ...”

“... expound her work through her own body: eternally ‘an athlete of God’, as she herself says; a David before the Ark. Graham’s own book, finished just before she died and burdened with a reluctant acceptance of mortality in its last pages, nevertheless begins briskly: ‘I am a dancer.’ She knew she still was, although she gave her last performance in ...”

“... to his Celtic romanticism’. He was part of a left-wing circle that included Raymond Williams, D.J. Enright and Maurice Craig, a Northern Irishman who remembered Henderson as ‘very loud-voiced, very insistently Scottish, and constantly singing’. During the two years he spent in Cambridge before the Second World War bore him off to North ...”

“... to whom Brown was royal gardener, remarked to one of his staff: ‘Now Mellicant you and I can do here what we please.’ His style was popular enough to be widely and often badly imitated, and by the 1790s clumps, belts and lakes seemed stale and formulaic. Uvedale Price spoke for many of his contemporaries when he complained that Brownian gardens looked ...”

“... Though that’s a situation which seems to mirror that of The History Boys the play has nothing to do with my contemporaries, only a couple of whom were historians anyway, but it does draw on some of the pains and the excitement of working for a scholarship at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were as daunting and mysterious to me as to any of the boys in the ...”

“... on which Inglis’s gods and heroes disport themselves. Thus at the memorial meeting in Conway Hall there is Nick Garnham, ‘elegant, intelligent, disdainful Wykehamist’. Earlier, at the Garden House Hotel riot – a Cambridge protest against the rule of the Greek colonels – there is Bob Rowthorn, ‘then as now the best-looking economist in a not ...”

“... She exploited Austin’s role as the treasurer of Amherst College to wangle her own husband, David, into powerful university positions and forced him to build her a Queen Anne-style house just across from his family home. After his death she conned his surviving sister, Lavinia, into deeding her some land. But, perhaps most damning of all, Emily ...”

“... undertakers hover in their closing pages), then at least from the crystal set to iPlayer. David Hendy’s book has the strengths of an insider’s account, packed with detail and anecdotes, shrewd in its assessment of personalities, light on socioeconomic change. Simon Potter’s is more academic and astringent. Potter tends to be critical where Hendy ...”

“... young, fair-haired Guards officer, keen as mustard, goes to the wars, performs deeds of derring-do, is badly wounded, shipped – and flown – home to a hero’s welcome. But the hero’s welcome was missing. The walking wounded were greeted at RAF Brize Norton by their families, the press and TV cameras: but the more seriously injured, the badly burned ...”

“... arise. First, what are the observations about solipsism (5.6 through 5.641) doing here? Secondly, do they prove, as some say, that Wittgenstein was then a solipsist, or do they prove, as others say, the opposite? Pears’s answers to these questions are in the considered tempo of the lecture ...”

“... not guilty by every peer there. His son George, having commanded his tenants to assemble in his hall to explain why they had failed to vote for him at an election, went mad before their eyes. Committed to the care of a mad-doctor, he ‘was unwilling to conform to any regulations, but ... could give an opinion on the value of cattle’. When it comes to the ...”

“... rather than another seems to lack any historical grounding: ‘Although existing family histories do not track changes in the father-daughter relationship over time,’ Perry writes, ‘I believe that by the late 18th century the responsibility of fathers for daughters was so far attenuated that the fantasy of paternal responsibility was the subject of ...”

“... setting suggests murky dealings – with John le Carré being thanked, under the non-pen name of David Cornwell, for ‘irresistible reminiscences’ – rather than any particular glamour. Serena Frome (the pronunciation of her name, Froom, poshly at odds with its spelling), both intelligent and beautiful, is the daughter of a bishop. Originally her gift is ...”

“... in an upstairs room . . . which had a Victrola for playing recorded dance tunes like “Songe d’Automne”. Whether sex sometimes followed one of Signor Rodolfo’s dancing sessions is anybody’s guess.’ Gay-for-pay: I’ll guess that sex followed, with women and (why not?) with men. He wasn’t the first to climb the ladder from prostitute to ...”