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“... employment and an active life prefer’d to solitude, published in 1667, was written to refute Sir George Mackenzie’s 1665 work, A Moral Essay, Preferring Solitude to Public Employment. The exchange was an exercise in paradox, with both disputants adopting positions contrary to their convictions. Evelyn’s text drew on a stock repertoire of arguments ...”

“... which was a dominating feature during the war. Now this, too, has vanished from existence. George Orwell was a recruit for it. I never thought much of Orwell, who has, I think, faded away again now that we have got safely through 1984, or nearly so. Maclaren-Ross has a special interest for me. He haunted the public houses of Soho just when I did the ...”

“... of enemies. Educated liberals, especially, accused him of lowering the tone of national debate. George Gissing was levelling this charge even before the Mail was founded. Once its anti-German campaign started, many claimed that it was making foreign tensions worse. Northcliffe has never ceased to be an object of fascination; fourteen books about him had ...”

“... Spirit of Despotism. The four remaining essays examine the class geography of London radicalism, George III’s personal reputation, the hair-powder tax controversy, and the country cottage as political icon. These ‘diverse collections of instances’ from the 1790s culture wars don’t quite add up to a book. But if they are, as I suspect, outtakes from ...”

“... The bookseller was a snob about snobbery and thought it was vulgar to talk about class. D.J. Taylor is perhaps a literary snob for Cooper gets no mention in his much less enjoyable The New Book of Snobs: A Definitive Guide to Modern Snobbery (Little, Brown, £16.99). His first mistake is to attempt a definition rather than rely on examples. He suggests ...”

“... it seems. This was answered by demonstrations of extreme Protestantism that outdid any seen at St George’s in the East, Stepney. As a result, political life in Liverpool developed a unique complexity: the rival parties not only playing, as it were, up and down the field but across it. Philip Waller has set out to disentangle the confusions of Liverpool ...”

“... More surprising and highly creditable, when MacDonald resigned as prime minister, King George proposed to admit him to the Order of the Thistle. MacDonald refused on the ground that he would have to be called ’Sir’. Now, elderly Labour figures fight to be called ‘My Lord’. What justification is there nowadays for a House of Lords? There is ...”

“... from different departments. The chairman of the Task Force, North reveals, was the Vice-President, George Bush. North gives him the highest accolade. ‘He was,’ he concludes, ‘comfortable with covert operations.’ Soon after Buckley was kidnapped in 1984, this little group with Bush at its head and North as its dynamo, was running the US Government ...”

“... by the most prolific of the poets reprinted by Malcolm: the celebrated scribbling wherryman John Taylor, known as the Water-Poet, enough of whose publications are in this vein to earn him the distinction of being England’s first professional manufacturer of nonsense. Taylor’s subsequent work includes, along with ...”

“... Some of the big names of Chartism don’t get as much coverage as they’re due. They include George Julian Harney, the nearest Chartism came to producing a true Jacobin; Bronterre O’Brien, the nearest Jacobinism came to producing a true Chartist; and Ernest Jones, the nearest Chartism and Jacobinism came to producing a great poet. There is a smattering ...”

“... of Dr Wenceslaus Bottwink, a Central European Jew and expert on the high politics of the reign of George III. In the course of his researches on certain ‘confidential letters’ written by Lord Bute in the early 1760s, Bottwink also manages to solve a murder. However, far from being the novel’s hero, the Namier figure is, in accordance with the reputation ...”

“... moral reminders from Labour Party history. Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay MacDonald’s ill-fated Cabinet to argue against dole cuts in 1931. Michael died as the brave new postwar world of the UN and the welfare state was taking shape. The diaries also record Benn’s obsessive love affair with ...”

“... paths with a white woman and her dog in Central Park on the morning of 25 May, the same day George Floyd was killed when a police officer in Minneapolis knelt on his neck for nine minutes. There are ‘white spaces’ in Central Park, and the Ramble, a wooded area popular with birdwatchers, is one of them. Cooper is 57 – almost exactly the age Joe ...”

“... will ever forget it. There, instantly accessible in their sliding metal racks, were the Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Beaverbrook and other papers; on a quiet day, when one was trusted, one could actually get out one’s own files. There also were to hand not only Hansard but Beaverbrook’s copies of the biographies and memoirs of practically every political ...”

“... harder and more brutal than anything hinted at in Eliot’s envoi for Will Ladislaw. Miles Taylor has assembled the evidence of an unfashionable life with enormous care, and what emerges is not a character who could be played on television by Rufus Sewell, but someone closer to the world of Gissing, to Edwin Reardon sweating away at the next ...”