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“... of which was very Jewish in its focus. Most notable were the painters Solomon J. Solomon ... and Mark Gertler ... The sculptor Sir Jacob Epstein (1880–1959), born to Polish-Jewish immigrant parents in New York, came to Paris in 1902 and settled in London three years later.” What are we to understand by ‘very Jewish’? That many artists were Jewish? A ...”

“... that of Henry Fielding and Jane Austen and Joseph Addison, like that of Thackeray and Shaw and Mark Twain. Like these writers, Tom Wolfe might be described as a brooding humanistic presence. There is a decided moral edge to his humour. Wofe never tells us what to believe exactly; rather, he shows us examples of good and (most often) bad form. He has always ...”

“... mostly not that things don’t last but precisely that they do. As, for example, these thoughts of Mark’s in the story ‘Desert Breakdown, 1968’:     Mark felt that he had been deceived, played with. Not by Krystal, she would never do that, but by everyone who had ever been married and knew the truth about it and ...”

“... ministers – Addington, Canning, Goderich, Grenville, Grey, Liverpool, Melbourne, Palmerston, Peel, Perceval, Pitt, Russell and Wellington – sat in the Commons at some time during this period; and so did men of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy ...”

“... be ‘improper to leave them out in any modern play’. They were generally believed honest, one mark of which may have been that, as Beattie calculates, between 1770 and 1790, of prosecutions where the runners gave evidence 79 per cent ended in a guilty verdict; the figure fell to 59 per cent where they did not. Fielding would have liked to run a force ...”

“... This was true even after the inclusion as local expenditure of the cost of the RIC, which both Peel and Goschen had identified as being more appropriately an Imperial charge because of that force’s political role. Even in 1889, revenue drawn from Ireland still exceeded local spending by 50 per cent. It was this Report that provided the intellectually ...”

“... The possession and use of a toothbrush was a mark of the difference between us and them, gentry and peasant, or so Lady Gregory suggested when she made the remark – jocular, perhaps, and not the sort of sally she would have chosen to be remembered by. Colm Tóibín makes more than one allusion to it in this essay, gently hinting that his sympathies are with the toothbrushless, though there is no place for anger in his elegant little study of the great lady ...”

“... Many within this group will stay loyal to the ANC in almost any circumstances, and those who peel off are likely either to support de Klerk or to become apathetic. The same polls show that the vast majority of blacks are delighted to have peace and reconciliation, don’t want a redistribution of wealth if it means confrontation, and are profoundly ...”

“... beliefs about the legitimacy of certain forms of profit or income – beliefs that have left their mark on the language. At a time when income from ownership of land underwrote the social order, a stigma attached to ‘rack-renting’, defined as ‘to raise rent above a fair or normal amount’. In times of war or other emergencies, the ‘profiteer’ is ...”

“... troubled. At the time of the dinner, Mary Shelley had written Frankenstein: its publication would mark the moment in fiction when the myth of man-created life passed for the first time from the artist’s studio to the laboratory, never to return. ‘There is a March of Science,’ Lamb wrote, ‘but who shall beat the drums for its retreat?’ Yet ...”

“... publishers will, if they have any sense, follow the example of Fontana over The Tory Party from Peel to Thatcher and produce a paperback at a rock-bottom price. How and why did British power decline? Perhaps what is surprising is that it should ever have enjoyed such greatness. It may not have been acquired, in Seeley’s over-quoted and misunderstood ...”

“... 1832, that the First Reform Bill would lead to the abolition of Christmas. The Restoration did not mark the healing of the divisions left by the Civil War: it marked the beginning of the long, slow and often undramatic process by which Englishmen learnt to live with them. One is moved to wonder, indeed, whether our own is the first generation which has been ...”

“... opposition concentrates the mind wonderfully, Disraeli and the Conservatives were quicker off the mark in this respect than the Liberals. There was no Liberal equivalent of John Gorst, the man who created the Conservative party machine in the early Seventies and to whom their victory in 1874 was largely due. Gladstone did not think in those terms at all at ...”

“... Norris, included in an earlier memoir but no worse for that. Uncle Norris was, I think, Grandpa Peel’s brother and was a wine and spirits merchant by profession. He ended his days in Stafford House, an old people’s home in Halifax, but very cheerfully, as he was convinced (and never missed an opportunity of telling you) that he was about to become a ...”

“... London: ‘The comers and goers face to face,/Face after face’. Blake’s Londoner can only ‘mark in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. In The City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson’s narrator prowls ‘lonely streets/Where one may count up every face he meets’. This is what the metropolitan insomniac does instead of counting ...”