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“... quiet. At last, on 20 October 1994, the paper published the story that Fayed had paid the MPs Tim Smith and Neil Hamilton to campaign on his behalf in the House of Commons. Smith, a former Tory Party Treasurer, admitted the payments and promptly resigned as a junior Northern Ireland Minister. Hamilton denied everything to ...”

“... in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She was born in 1843 into a family that Logan Pearsall Smith described as a ‘fine old succession of country people, “quality folk” as they are called’, but with more interest in the arts than many such families. The Jekylls had a life-size cast of the Venus de Milo in the dining-room. They moved to Surrey ...”

“... fathers had done before us. In contrast to Bindoff’s vision of a Tudor stakeholder society, Sir Geoffrey Elton taught successive cohorts of students that what mattered most in ‘that crowded century’ was ‘the condition, reconstruction, and gradual moulding of a state’. Other aspects, including the economic and social, got shorter shrift. ‘This ...”

“... diary and the letters she exchanged with her cousin Franklin Roosevelt, found and edited by Geoffrey Ward) and No Ordinary Time (Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the home front during World War Two) are products of the current obsession with the private lives of public figures. But the books about the President’s women are ...”

“... You​ would be hard pressed to describe Geoffrey Hill’s final work. To say it is a sort of notebook cast as a prose poem in 271 sections of greatly varying length doesn’t get you very far. In one way it is squarely in the tradition of Pope’s Dunciad (which it mentions): it is a poem about the betrayal of England, a yowl of anger and outrage at the prevailing imbecility Hill often addressed in his later works ...”

“... 1930 her will replaced Marsh with four men she liked better). The most active of the new trustees, Geoffrey Keynes, brother of Maynard (‘the iron copulating-machine’ whose exploits are much discussed by Brooke and Strachey), was distressed at the idea that people might think Brooke was gay because Marsh, as Keynes put it, had ‘lived in a sexual ...”

“... policy against the nationalists if Britain would only make their chiefs ‘divine’ again. Ian Smith took the same general line in 1965, just before the (Southern) Rhodesian UDI, when he recommended as a true test of African opinion on his regime ‘indabas’ of chiefs rather than a referendum. Hastings Banda, the Nyasaland nationalist leader, responded ...”

“... fine thing (our entry was acclaimed by the whole of the press as well as by Neil Kinnock and John Smith): a view which held until, roughly, September 1992, when the conviction grew on all sides that it had been a colossal mistake. Few will argue with John Major’s asssumption that the 1997 election was lost on Black Wednesday. But when the conventional ...”

“... able to buck the national trends, though unpopular local ones (hello Lembit Opik, hello Jacqui Smith) couldn’t rely on general goodwill to see them home. Yet in the cold light of morning, once the dust had settled, and before Cameron and Clegg decided to stir it all up again, this looked like a pretty conventional sort of result. A tough economic ...”

“... the last five or six years, there have only been three significant long-running stories: the Helen Smith case, the Thorpe trial and the Goldsmith imbroglio. In the first, the Eye is merely – though admirably – allying itself to someone else’s valiant and obsessive personal quest; the second is an example of the passive scoop (police officers deliberately ...”

“... are upturned – The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith (1993) is a good example – than it does with fairy tales themselves. The narrative – which teems with talking animals – constantly plays with fairy-tale convention. Cinderella’s carriage pulled by mice-horses is reconfigured as the Blue Fairy’s ...”

“... Moscow often commented on the exhaustive, repeated recitation of the tsar’s titles. For Thomas Smith in 1605 this was ‘ever their custom’. Miege, less patiently, described it as ‘troublesome and ridiculous’. And there is an element of absurdity even in Milton’s salutation, as though the list of fantastical-sounding lordships running from Moscow ...”

“... were so serious that they couldn’t be contained politically. In a 2013 study, the historian Geoffrey Parker argued that the ‘general crisis’ of the 17th century, a litany of wars, invasions, rebellions, massacres, epidemics and famines, can be explained by the Little Ice Age. Others have seen the origins of the French Revolution in climate ...”

“... early poems gave me enormous trouble when I was an undergraduate. Confident teachers spoke of Geoffrey Grigson’s advice to Thirties poets to ‘report well. Begin with objects and events.’ These poets were socially concerned, we were told; they were tempted by Communism, wanted to open some negotiation with popular culture, and to include the ...”

“... with the superb annotated Selections from the Prison Notebooks produced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1971), a great deal of Gramsci has become available in first-rate translation. There are two further volumes of Political Writings, covering the whole period from 1910 up to his imprisonment in 1926: and ...”