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“... Jubilee Galleries (worth it, in my opinion, for the effigy of Nelson and another from 1686 of Charles II in one of his own outfits). This makes it, by my reckoning, the world’s most expensive church, rivalled only by Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia, which charges €26 – though there the money goes to actually finishing the cathedral. St Paul’s is a ...”

“... as he says it is. He is treading geographically but not methodologically in the footsteps of Charles Booth. His aim is to convey to his readers as vividly as he can just how awful are the lives of the poor and powerless inhabitants of the inner cities of a supposedly civilised nation which ought to be a great deal more ashamed of allowing such conditions ...”

“... incline to applaud in them evidence of a strenously physical relationship with paint. Thus Mali Morris, Lucy Ellmann tells us, works ‘with acrylic on unstretched canvas on the floor ... pulling gobs of paint a little way or densely caking colour on, with rough or gentle strokes. The paint sometimes seems to have flitted across, barely swooping low enough ...”

“... a mountain quarry in British Columbia. Fossils had first been discovered there by a US geologist, Charles Walcott, in 1909 (as Gould convincingly shows, from Walcott’s diaries). In the next eight years, Walcott collected over eighty thousand specimens and deposited them in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He never found the time to work on them as ...”

“... The resignation of Estelle Morris surprised most people: not just because of its timing but because she resigned on grounds of incompetence – to outsiders she seemed more unlucky than incompetent. For any politician such an admission is amazing, and that, understandably, occupied everyone’s attention. What few noticed was that she had not resigned on a matter of principle ...”

“... leave things as they were until the blockage was relieved.’ The layman will surely go along with Charles Rycroft on the psychiatrist R.D. Laing, when he says: ‘It is difficult to take seriously the idea that we are all traumatised by separation from “our intra-uterine twin, lover, rival, double”, the placenta.’ The judiciary is a profession whose ...”

“... for example, and even, belatedly, airports – Krier approves of the new departure gates at Charles de Gaulle, and César Pelli’s work at Washington. What he finds dangerous is innovation for the sake of innovation – although so did Mies van der Rohe, who always wanted to design good buildings rather than interesting ones. ‘In traditional ...”

“... from them. London’s wealthy had been moving west since the 17th century and McWilliam fixes on Charles II’s Restoration in 1660 as the moment when the economy took off again after the uncertainties and destruction caused by the Civil Wars. The plague saw only a temporary retreat, and the population of London quadrupled between 1550 and 1700. It was ...”

“... Wychwood used to stretch from Woodstock to Burford but now only Blenheim and Cornbury remain. Charles I gave Cornbury to Clarendon and the palatial house was built by the minister after the Restoration. The park is full of army lorries now, but the golden-stoned house looking down on the string of lakes is visible through the medieval oaks, We walked ...”

“... Bromley and Chislehurst constituency. A couple of months earlier, another Conservative MP, David Morris, apologised for lobbying on behalf of an energy firm that had given him £10,000. Morris had urged the energy minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, to lobby Ofgem to change regulations in ways that could benefit Aquind ...”

“... billion. Home Bargains has nearly 600 stores throughout Britain and the company’s owner, Tom Morris, enjoys the excellent designation of being the richest Liverpudlian in history. For fans of Paul McCartney, it’s depressing to find that there’s a lot more money in disposable toilet wipes than there is in writing ‘Love Me Do’. Still, McCartney ...”

“... not private life. It was left to a couple involved in the Arts and Crafts movement, the architect Charles Henry Bourne Quennell and his wife, Marjorie, a painter, to produce four volumes of an immensely successful History of Everyday Things in England, published between 1918 and 1934. Addressed to teenage readers, and wonderfully illustrated by the Quennells ...”

“... hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of Charles Lamb (the ‘gentle-hearted’) – but the broad allusion did pretty much what was wanted, assuring the theoretically advanced ...”

“... snails and sex cults and the dead children of children’s book authors. She wrote about William Morris and Mariano Fortuny. She wrote about Cambridge, where she and her sister Margaret Drabble were educated in the 1950s, and about the landscape of Yorkshire, where they were raised. She wrote about the educational revolution of the 1960s and the purple ...”

“... Take the entry on Mary Kennard where the Companion records that she was the daughter of one Charles Faber ‘not Samuel Laing, as sometimes claimed’. The Laing claim is made in my Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (which also has a grotesquely wrong date of death for Kennard) and in R.L. Wolff’s Nineteenth-Century Fiction, A Bibliographical ...”