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“... response has been a 100,000-word credo to show he can be a real politician like his grandfather, Herbert Morrison. The decision to write The Blair Revolution was made, Mandelson has explained, after reading a profile I wrote of him last year in the Guardian – ‘the single most damaging piece ever published about me’, he insists – which described how ...”

“... out its agenda like clockwork, struck the newcomers as mechanistic; in the words of Ulrich Herbert, it ‘amounted to little more than recording the steps in an apparently automated process’. Where did the dynamism of this process come from? What caused the Nazis suddenly to abandon the idea of deportation to Madagascar and begin to shoot Jews en ...”

“... with well prepared cases. Her advocacy of family allowances saw her meet furious opposition from Walter Citrine, Ernest Bevin and, to its undying shame, the whole Trade Union Group in Parliament. The more she tried to persuade the diehard trade unionists to focus on the fact that more than half of all children lived in poverty, the more determined these ...”

“... common in Birmingham than in Liverpool, Sheffield or Manchester.’ He suggests, via the writer Walter Allen (one of the few Birmingham intellectuals from a working-class background), that class consciousness might actually have been sharpened by knowing your own boss. The factory owner, for Allen, was ‘my enemy; he stands in my way,’ and seeing him ...”

“... awarded a lucrative contract to supply radio equipment to the empire by the postmaster-general, Herbert Samuel. After helping to expose the scandal in the New Witness, Cecil Chesterton was sued for libel by Godfrey Isaacs, and lost. G.K. regarded his brother’s action as heroic, and unhappiness with Cecil’s legal defeat, Oddie argued, explains G.K.’s ...”

“... to return from the village.  And when all the coats had been sold, the jewels and the suits, Herbert went into Balaban’s room, sorted out his clothes and tied them up in a sheet. Tomorrow he would sell them to the farmers. At night, of course, people were afraid. But they helped one another. If a man fell or was beaten, he was not abandoned.‘Of ...”

“... interested in Taylor’s more orthodox poems, which he valued, as would any good friend of Sir Walter Scott, as a source of quaint details about everyday life in Jacobean London. Malcolm’s proposal of an unbroken, overarching historical trajectory of nonsense stretching from the Renaissance to the Victorians looks equally shaky in the other ...”

“... by the British. ‘A large quantity of brass castings & carved tusks have been found,’ Captain Herbert Walker noted in his diary. ‘The Admiral & his staff have been very busy “safeguarding” the remainder, so I doubt if there will be much left for smaller fry … The whole camp is strewn with loot.’ Olfert Dapper had referred to the bronzes ...”

“... Wagner proleptically with the Holocaust is to go much further than Achebe, and further even than Walter Benjamin, for whom every document of civilisation was also a document of barbarism. It is to amputate unseemly and horrible experiences altogether from the realm of the human, and as such is a view incapable of development, argument or reconciliation.I ...”

“... and Emily Apter, in Against World Literature (2013), connects his secular theology to that of Walter Benjamin. Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1892, took a doctorate in law at the University of Heidelberg, served in the army during World War One, took another doctorate in Romance languages at the University of Greifswald, was librarian at the Prussian ...”

“... have the allusion I have just spotted to the song ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life’ by Young and Herbert (from Naughty Marietta). ‘At last I’ve found thee,’ the line continues, picking up the idea of finding pain when paradise is lost, or has lost us. ‘Mistery’ suggests missing mastery as well as what we don’t know. Another reference: And there ...”

“... Some had military experience, though it wasn’t always the useful kind: ‘Manchester volunteer Walter Greenhalgh, for example, had served in the Territorial Army, but had done so as a drummer and the value of his expertise was probably limited.’ Many were veterans of the 1931 naval mutiny at Invergordon, or the hunger marches of the early 1930s, or the ...”

“... and for the English and those aspiring to Englishness that generally meant the Tudors, who, from Walter Scott’s Kenilworth to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, still stand in the national imagination for History with a capital H. Among the most important rescued buildings Tinniswood discusses are Hever Castle in Kent, the home of Anne Boleyn, which was done up ...”

“... to gangland New York, Xenophon’s story embedded itself in popular consciousness through Walter Hill’s 1979 punk movie, The Warriors. One incident in particular captures readers’ imaginations: the shout of ‘Thalatta! Thalatta!’ (‘The sea! The sea!’) uttered by the Greeks as they catch sight of the Black Sea from Mount Theches (eagerly ...”

“... the Bibescus. A Frenchified descendant of an old princely family, Antoine Bibescu had married Herbert Asquith’s daughter, Elisabeth. Asquith, it seems, had taken the alliance badly. ‘For him,’ Bibescu remarked, ‘it was as if she had married a Chinaman.’ The prince, Sebastian adds, felt the same about Romanian society. Eccentric, a bit ...”