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“... my dearest is in danger.’ We have stumbled upon a hidden love story. A sad tale’s best for winter – this is a sad tale, this story of a January death. Johnson at this point seems battered by life, almost afraid of giving love lest it be taken from him. Johnson’s need for love substantiates his tremendous loyalty. The troubles of his parents seem to ...”

“... to the Express, with its much later first-edition time of 10 p.m., crying in imitation of Flash Gordon as he rushed out of the door: ‘I’ve only got four hours to save the Daily Express!’ ... The first copies of the Sun would then be brought, ink still wet on their pages. He would look through them virtually keeping an open phone line to the ...”

“... of the workings of change and transformation. The storming of the Bastille, the taking of the Winter Palace, the Peasants’ Revolt, Captain Swing, the Gordon Riots and Watts tend to be reconstructed as a series of memorable tableaux, punctuating the flow of events and creating major divisions between what went before ...”

“... after a British separate peace, but not indefinitely. Sooner or later, the succession of German winter defeats followed by Soviet summer defeats would have given way to a more definite outcome. Even the permanently warring frontier that Hitler delighted to imagine, where Germanic youth could be tested and culled before procreating, presumed a defeated ...”

“... the married women’s property campaign.Bodichon was taken by her brother to Algeria for the winter of 1856, partly to stimulate her painting career, but also in the hope that its warmth and colour might revive her spirits. Here she met Eugène, a rugged, brooding doctor who healed the poor, loved nature and wrote books about social conditions. He was ...”

“... the way in which, on becoming leader of the Conservative Party, she put herself in the hands of Gordon Reece, a former television producer, who knew just what needed to be done. The hair was wrong, too suburban; it was restyled. The clothes were wrong, too fussy; they were replaced. The voice was wrong, too shrill; it was lowered in pitch through lessons ...”

“... In Hans Christian Andersen’s famous tale, Karen, a peasant girl, goes barefoot in summer and in winter wears wooden clogs that rub her feet raw, but the mirror tells her she’s lovely and she thinks that wearing the red shoes will make her feel like a princess. Like selfish Heidi and tomboy Katy, Karen is a mid-19th century girl crippled by egotism. The ...”

“... fall in love. Two bitter poems of 1908 mark the end of the relationship. Five years later, in the winter of 1913, Blok attended a performance of Carmen in St Petersburg and immediately fell in love with the heroine: Lyubov Aleksandrovna Delmas. ‘A fine mezzo-soprano with a scorching temperament, tawny eyes, red-gold hair and a voluptuous, graceful ...”

“... with artists who were busy inventing their reputations. One night, I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that ...”

“... Gladstone’s reminder that ‘the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own.’ The Gladstonian agenda does not apply solely to government, or even to a single party. Over the past two decades, each of the three main parties has experienced a Gladstonian ...”

“... on her books and clothes. Before the Clean Air Acts, everything in London, as soon as the winter fogs began, was black, or blackish, by the end of the day. Charlotte, always immaculate in white shirt-blouses, had once called laundry ‘the curse of civilisation’. But unluckily the language of hygiene – contamination, impurity, resistance, fight ...”

“... seen for three years, was good nature itself. It was another decade before I saw him again. In the winter of 1979, in a freezing church in Oxford, he rose like some wrathful divine to warn the congregation once more of the dangers of Gallican dogma. By now, his onslaught on Althusser in The Poverty of Theory, published the previous year, had roused much ...”

“... young and rather overexcited Gloria walking near Commonwealth Avenue: ‘It was a twenty-degree winter’s evening. Brick and limestone architecture, the trolley running down the avenue, frozen air, the burning orange sunset, a frigid cosmic fire, the sense of distance, the turrets of the apartments, the courtyards, gates and gargoyles, the wealthy, the ...”

“... bravely in the summer of 1924, when the epistolary flirtation that Brittain had struck up with Gordon Catlin, a politics lecturer at Cornell, suddenly flowered into an engagement. ‘I love you in a way that part of me has become part of you. When you are troubled, so must I be, whether I like it or not. When you are happy, part of me is happy, whatever ...”

“... century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the only – way for ...”