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“... There is something off-key about all these jewels and feathers, braid and enamel and gold. When John Singer Sargent’s tremendous portrait of the colonial administrator Sir Frank Swettenham inspired Rebecca West to comment that ‘he looked as if he wasn’t quite a gentleman,’ was she showing her sensitivity to the excess of his display? To the ...”

“... Isleworth Crown Court was persuaded that the sex workers organised themselves co-operatively and freely. When the ECP was founded in 1975, they argued that housewives should stand with sex workers: ‘All women benefit from prostitutes’ successful attempts to receive cash for sexual work, because the cash makes it clear that women are working when we are ...”

“... 2005 papal conclave, when he was the main contender against Joseph Ratzinger after the death of John Paul II. It centred on the arrest and torture of two Jesuit priests, Oswaldo Yorio and Franz Jalics. Bergoglio had known both of them since the early 1960s – they had been his teachers. By the time Bergoglio took over as provincial of Argentina and ...”

“... distance frightened them all, even Carlyle’s mother: ‘We had all to complain that we durst not freely love him. His heart seemed as if walled in . . . it seemed as if an atmosphere of Fear repelled us from him.’ The centre of Carlyle’s emotional world was his mother. It was to her that he confided the disquiets of his honeymoon, about her illnesses ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”

“... vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the arch-Victorianist and founder of Private Eye’s ‘Nooks and Corners’ (originally called ‘Nooks and Corners of the New Barbarism’), admired the design, to the point where he wrote a letter of appreciation to Lasdun: ‘I gasped with ...”

“... Mew may have grown up to be secretive – she was certainly no party-goer – but she wrote quite freely about her childhood, directly in prose, obliquely in her poems. She enjoyed nursery life: in some ways she never got over it. ‘I like you best when you are small,’ says a would-be lover, in her poem ‘On the Road to the Sea’, and though Mew may here ...”

“... feeler, thinker, chooser. In considering each element in turn, I use the expression ‘the self’ freely, as a loose name for all the undeniably real phenomena that lead us to think and talk in terms of the self. This doesn’t rule out the possibility that the best thing to say, in the end, is that there is no such thing. The first claim, that the self is ...”

“... in part to buy time while composing the next line. (As it happens, Parry corresponded with John and Alan Lomax, who travelled around the American South recording folk musicians.) ‘The singer of tales,’ Parry later wrote, ‘has no pen and ink to let him slowly work out a novel way of recounting novel actions, but must make up his tale without ...”

“... him with Basil Fawlty. Except that the dying Dennis Potter went further, maybe, when he called John Birt, the BBC’s then director-general, ‘a croak-voiced Dalek’ in 1993. Much expectation surrounded Doctor Who’s return last year, into an industry that has changed vastly since he went away. Mark Thompson, the BBC’s current director-general, sees ...”

“... to the astronauts, as well as their families and the engineers. Now that the Life archive is freely available on Google Books, it’s easy to see how central coverage of the space programme was to the magazine in the 1960s, when it had a circulation of almost ten million. By the time the Apollo programme ended in 1972, public enthusiasm for space travel ...”

“... was homosexual.’ Thirty years later, when Eliot’s prestige and influence were at their zenith, John Peter, a Canadian academic, published an article in Essays in Criticism called ‘A New Interpretation of The Waste Land’. Peter argued that the poem was at heart an elegy that might be compared to Tennyson’s In Memoriam: ‘At some previous time the ...”

“... one does: ‘When I was in graduate school I was startled to find this story’s source in The John Collier Reader, – or so I have always believed until this afternoon, when I first riffled, then paged carefully, front to back, back to front, through the local copy (Knopf, 1972) and discovered no trace of such a story anywhere in the book.’ But over ...”

“... would be permissible in a system that kept government spending firmly in check, and exporting gold freely abroad during wartime was impossible. The state assumed new and unprecedented powers over the national economy. The bank lost ground to the Treasury, which among other things took charge of approving new issues of currency. (Lord Cunliffe, governor of the ...”

“... and thinking about Cézanne. ‘Je vois. Par taches,’ Cézanne remarked, which Clark translates freely as ‘seeing is patchwork.’ Saying what the art is ‘about’, Clark states in this same spirit: ‘I flinch from doing this.’ He is thus most mimetic in his desire to tarry in the antinomies of a Cézanne painting, as Cézanne tarries in the ...”