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“... poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long ...”

“... as a system is as dead as Communism. Just as Liberalism, victorious under Asquith and Lloyd George, created the social groups and forces that were to destroy it, so social democracy was undone by its victory in the Sixties and Seventies. As the solid blue-collar working class fragmented and an employee class emerged, the old class conflict turned into a ...”

“... the freest and fairest in Singaporean history – which made the Labour Front leader, David Marshall, head of the local advisory board of what remained a British colony. The son of Sephardic Baghdadis, Marshall had been a Japanese POW in the mines of Hokkaido, and had Fabian connections in London. He proposed the ...”

“... also by coincidence, a study of a single royal event. This was Mass-Observation’s study of King George VI’s coronation in 1937 – May 12. Two hundred ‘observers’ were posted about the country and instructed to note what they observed: with the exception of those who kept a record of what they themselves felt, they were not to intrude or act as ...”

“... reform in the first decade of the 20th century, when Britain had lost what the economist Alfred Marshall called its ‘industrial leadership’, and when the Conservative Party came nearer Green’s vision of it being continually riven by disputes over ideas than at any other time. While Balfour’s overriding objective was to prevent his party from ...”

“... marry the same woman to the next in line. Accordingly, the biddable Mary was made over to Prince George, whom even Ziegler feels obliged to write down as: ‘an arch-conformist; bored by books, pictures, music; wholly without intellectual curiosity or imagination; suspicious of new ideas; entertained only by his stamp collection and the slaughter of ever ...”

“... up a small annual pension to a widow in Shropshire; parishes that were more pressed – like St George the Martyr in Southwark, which included several debtors’ prisons with their collateral burdens of wives and children lodging nearby – had to weigh up their choices: they could give casual relief, or insist that claimants return to their home parish ...”

“... 10 March. At 6:45 a.m. I set off by car service to Newark airport to catch the 10 a.m. Virgin/Continental flight to Gatwick. At this time of the morning the New Jersey Turnpike is too busy altogether. This use of altogether, I’m reminded by Terence Patrick Dolan in A Dictionary of Hiberno-English, means ‘wholly, completely’ and may be compared to the Irish phrase ar fad, particularly in its positioning at the end of a sentence ...”

“... entirely in character that on her husband’s becoming Prelate of the Order of St Michael and St George she adopted the style of an (honorary) knight’s wife, though she had no right to it – was not wise in the management of a tough little boy and systematically denied him any display of love at all. Her own fortunes in love had been mixed. The daughter ...”

“... how Tom comes to know it, too, as I’m sure boxing isn’t his thing. 22 January. I’m reading George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books, a series of chapters, some more autobiographical than others, on the books he wishes he’d written. The first section is on the Cambridge scholar and scientist Joseph Needham, microbiologist and expert on China, a man who ...”

“... Indeed, Clinton’s rise is matched in American history only by the equally spectacular fall of George (‘Desert Storm’) Bush, the collapse that put the Arkansas Governor in the White House in the first place. Newt Gingrich rode the Contract with America to victory in 1994, giving Republicans their first control of the House of Representatives under a ...”

“... for McCartney’s new lockdown solo album; various reflections on the fiftieth anniversary of George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass; various reflections on the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death; a trailer for Peter Jackson’s new Beatles documentary, Get Back; a new documentary about Mark David Chapman; an article trailed as ‘the inside ...”

“... editor of the Jewish Frontier; editor of the papers of the lawyer and civil rights activist Louis Marshall; co-author of a history of the Jews of Charleston and an unfinished history of the Jews of Cleveland. His one extended stay outside New York City – he never left the US – was the three years he spent in the 1930s in Hollywood as an assistant to his ...”

“... by contrast, saw the need for sustained containment of the Soviet Union nearly a year before George Kennan sent his famous Long Telegram from Moscow. Bevin’s vigorous scepticism and his quick understanding of what other people were actually like – a rare quality in politicians, that race of incurable solipsists – went with an equally quick eye for ...”

“... same time as Mrs Kennedy’s stockings were drying, observed in a 1988 Encounter interview with George Urban that to equate Nazism and Communism was the reflex of the country club bar. Marxism, in its various transformations and dilutions, provides no excuse for the falsifications, compromises and self-deceit which Communists had to practise, but it does ...”