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“... stay in Italy. Then after Christmas I read Gabriele Annan’s review in the LRB (7 January) of James Fox’s The Langhorne Sisters – Nancy had been the middle one of the five – and began to understand. Not long afterwards I looked through the manuscript memoirs of my old head of chambers, John Platts-Mills. John, now ...”

“... Abbey; exploiting the ever-so-slightly poisoned territory yielded by ordnance factories, gunpowder mills, chemical and electrical industries. The documents put out by the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority dazzle with their high gloss. They confuse weight with importance. Lee Valley Regional Park Plan, Part One: Strategic Policy Framework runs to 180 pages ...”

“... His present-day biographer inherits a tradition of controversy dating back a full hundred years. James Anthony Froude, the first of the succession, had been Carlyle’s friend and disciple for thirty years, and it was to him that Carlyle entrusted the keeping of his posthumous fame. As he worked over his master’s papers, Froude never forgot his ...”

“... as a developed perspective rather than a thwarted intuition, is a recent phenomenon. In 1988, James O’Connor, founding editor of the American journal Capital Nature Socialism, proposed that the ‘capital-nature relation’ is no less fundamental than the capital-labour relation in analysing how capitalism reproduces and, ultimately, undermines ...”

“... one rung on the ladder with each noble incumbent’s death. Chinese ethnocentrism: in 1759, James Flint, a trader for the East India Company, was arrested for, among other things, having learned Chinese. Patriarchy: a father who had been sentenced to beating for having buried his son alive had the verdict overturned by the Ministry of Punishment, on the ...”

“... women use scenarios from The Bitch interspersed with dramatic accidents. The men use war films or James Bond and pretend they’re stuntmen. The nicest thing about filming’s being paid in cash at the end of the day. It’s easy to save because you’re too tired to spend it. By then, they’ve fed you about six meals – ordinary ones, and snacks of rolls ...”

“... insisting on his estranged son’s Irishness. Morrissey was a lovelorn fan of Oscar Wilde and James Dean, Elsie Tanner and the New York Dolls, and he appears to have made something of an art out of moping around the house in a melancholy, jobless, big-cardiganed way, dreaming of a wonderful romance involving himself and every image he ever cared ...”

“... of rank injustice. Besides, the pro-slavery apologists were not alone in deploring the satanic mills of early industrialism. Southern critics of the American Thomas Gradgrinds and Josiah Bounderbys relied on the documentation of reformers and on public reports, not on their own investigations. Furthermore, Thoreau or Hawthorne could be as critical of the ...”

“... saying that the only VC awarded to an Ulsterman during the war had been won by a Catholic, James Magennis. One of the people on the panel, his boss, came back at him in a dull stupid rigid voice: ‘I happen to know he only got the Victoria Cross because he happened to be a Catholic.’ That combination of bigotry, crassness and sheer thick ignorance ...”

“... shape. His informants made clear to him that time itself took a new form in America’s satanic mills. The clock – and the machinery – ticked relentlessly. Taylorist managers and hard-pressed foremen insisted on quick, efficient work. At one factory in Detroit, a parts plant, a woman worker told him that the machines were so close together her ears ...”

“... now looks, henna’d: and you will see in one corner of your mind’s eye a little picture of Mr Mills the vicar talking – oh, very kindly – to Millicent after she has come back from Brighton … But perhaps you had better not risk that. You remember some of the things said by means of which Millicent has made you cringe – and her ...”

“... a quarter of a century ago, supplies one clue. The narrator is set off by a recollection of Henry James, who after fifty years remembered ‘a boy cousin being sketched in the nude at Newport before his life was “cut short, in a cavalry clash, by one of the Confederate bullets of 1863” ’.Death, summer, youth – this triad contrives to haunt me every ...”

“... and equal inclusion within imperial frameworks before rejecting them altogether. The Jamaican James Williams, a former slave, used imperial justice against the repressive ‘apprentice’ system that persisted after the abolition of slavery; the Indian liberal Dadabhai Naoroji criticised ‘un-British rule’ in the hope of realising the economic ...”

“... protagonists as drunken, xenophobic, lecherous oafs, he goes some way to being believed. Lloyd James and his friend Owen, two wealthy con-men, become entangled in the amateurish activities of ‘Caesar’, the bilateral Committee on the Year of the Special Relationship. Caesar’s hopes of strengthening Anglo-American diplomacy come to little, even though ...”

“... in Shanghai and then Canton launched the birth of a popular revolution in China that brought the mills of Lancashire to a halt for the best part of two years. As monumental New Delhi rose in Lutyens’s imperial splendour, Anglo-Indians anxiously decamped to the suburbs of London. The fate of the Empire mirrored the fate of the treaties. Despite the ...”