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“... for deciding when scheming for party political advantage becomes ‘unconstitutional’. Gordon Brown would probably not be in the mess he currently is if the timing of elections was excluded from routine political calculation. When Brown flirted with calling an election last autumn, in order to take advantage of a ...”

“... rather dogged about some aspects of the Pre-Raphaelite work ethic. In April 1855, Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary about the drawing for Work: ‘This is now to me a species of intoxication,’ he exclaims. ‘When I drew in the poor little vixen girl pulling her brother’s hair, I quite growled with delight.’ This entry is interesting because it ...”

“... the brief has been stretched too far. Wilson’s canonisation came after those of Charles Brockden Brown, H.P. Lovecraft, James Weldon Johnson, George Kaufman, William Bartram and Theodore Roosevelt. He might not have been too chuffed about that. I am an abject fan of the Library. I own, I find, ten of its volumes: three of Parkman, one each of Henry ...”

“... Edward Thomas​ believed that up to about the age of four what he called ‘a sweet darkness’ enfolded him ‘with a faint blessing’. It was, though, a darkness and the blessing was faint. ‘From an early age’, Jean Moorcroft Wilson writes, Thomas ‘felt cursed by a self-consciousness he believed the chief cause of his later problems and depression ...”

“... Public inquiries​ are an ancient institution. Edward I’s Statute de Officio Coronatoris of 1276, which codified already longstanding law, obliged coroners to ‘go to the place where any be slain or suddenly dead’ to investigate. But coroners’ inquiries rarely deal with matters of general public concern. The idea of holding an inquiry in response to a public scandal is comparatively recent ...”

“... Morison’s black suits and Corbusier’s bow tie), Lutyens wore, as his daughter remembers, brown suits, brown shoes, duck-egg green shirts with high starched butterfly collars and a narrow black tie. His drawing-rooms had black walls (semi-gloss), white ceilings and woodwork, green painted floors and yellow ...”

“... hero and demonic waters: I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed and intractable ... Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. (Eliot was of course referring to the Mississippi, and he used similar phrases in an essay on Huckleberry Finn.) The second ...”

“... in the long decade of 1872-84 were born Marcel Mauss (1872), Alfred Kroeber (1876), A.R. Radcliffe-Brown (1881), and Bronislaw Malinowski (1884), with Ruth Benedict (1887) at the tail end. The second generation were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss ...”

“... growth, like those of Madame de Sevigné, Madame du Deffand, Mademoiselle de Lespinasse, Edward FitzGerald or indeed the great Swift himself. They bear the same relationship to such products as do those modern diaries like Crossman’s, written with malice aforethought and for publication, to the diaries of Pepys who did not mean to be read. This is ...”

“... to see six chickens he tended – G.L. Dickinson, E.J. Dent, Siegfried Sassoon, Forrest Reid and Edward Carpenter. Interesting, too, when they involve places, travels, holidaying. Forster had what sounds like a very long holiday, beginning in October 1901, with his mother in Italy. Five months in Germany in 1905 didn’t leave a permanent impression. But the ...”

“... and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all ...”

“... Arthur Benson​ never stopped dreaming about his father. Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped dead saying the Confession in 1896 – he sank onto his prayer cushion and didn’t get up again – but nearly twenty years later his son found him crouched in the cupboard under the stairs, dressed in his purple cassock and playing with some toys: ‘Papa … giggled; then he said: “But now that you have found me out, you must run down here as often as you can, and we will have a good game at something – You don’t know what fun it is ...”

“... reading seem musty, costumed, made-up. Anyone who finds his poems flat or prosaic might consider Edward Thomas’s defence of Robert Frost: ‘if his work were printed [as prose] it would have little in common with the kind of prose that runs to blank verse ... It is poetry because it is better than prose.’ A New Path to the Waterfall is poetry because it ...”

“... challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in body, soul and spirit.’ He was reduced to a beastlike stupor – but then one day he fought back, unnerving Covey, who didn’t want to admit that the 16-year-old still had the ...”

“... of chattel have crashed in value over the last quarter of a century, and none more so than ‘brown furniture’. Changes in lifestyle have played a part. An indoor pool or family cinema is now a higher priority than a library among those who can afford such things; dining is less formal and a tea table not required for mugs. But you might suppose that ...”