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“... boasts of being ‘admired of those that hate [him] most’. ‘A sicke Machiavell Pollititian,’ John Stephens wrote in his Essays of 1615, ‘is a baked meate for the devill.’ No other political theorist has received remotely similar treatment. Hobbes, who came in for a handsome share of vilification from the 1650s, was namechecked as an early exponent of ...”

“... drawing given by Haslam is ‘Pair of labourers’ cottages, North Wales, 1905 ... 3½d per cubic foot or £296 the pair’. A few pages later comes one of the earliest of his huge series of county cottage styles, the ‘Montgomeryshire Type’, with its legend: ‘Total Cubic Contents of Pair Measured Outside, 19805; Estimated Cost of Pair £372; Cost per ...”

“... British (1987) about Auden, Dali, MacNeice and Co – both begins and ends with the first words of John Masefield’s ‘Cargoes’ (‘Quinquereme of Nineveh’), like a serpent with its tail in its mouth. Codes and allusions proliferate in ‘Yarrow’ too, but are not allowed to structure its meanings or progression to the same extent; underlying – or ...”

“... More often, though, they end up forgetting what it was that made them average – no left foot, slow on the turn, weak in the air – and forgetting, too, the safety ploys they had developed in order to disguise their averageness. And this can make for some weird and wonderful defensive cock-ups. Still, who would rather be watching Leeds United? For ...”

“... in the world when it was wrecked in the late 16th century. The ship gave its name to Port Saint John, where it is believed to have sunk on its return from Cochin China, with a cargo of spices and china, but my friend has been picking up a quantity of cannonshot as well as pieces of willow pattern-like china. Drilling down into the sandbank at the edge of ...”

“... metaphorical meaning is the more obvious. Speculative builders have covered every possible square foot of ground with rentable buildings crammed so close together that, especially in the alleys where so many people exist, it is dark, even in the daytime. Tailors and other outworkers have to squeeze up near to the window to save both their sight and the ...”

“... piece of water,” said Captain Hamilton.’ He has many other matters to occupy him, sailing a 37-foot boat alone, but he still has an eye for a funny piece of water. Speaking as one who has occasionally seen some funny water, I can say that I have rarely if ever seen its funniness so accurately described as it is here – not by Conrad, not by anybody in ...”

“... Jane Cumming with them: Miss Pirie and Miss Woods shared a bed; Miss Cumming slept in a bed at the foot of theirs. She claimed it was at Portobello that she had first been disturbed by whispering, kissing and ‘shaking the bed’ in the early mornings. She said that on returning to the school and her shared bed with Miss Pirie she was often woken by Miss ...”

“... trench warfare on the Western Front. Professor Graham’s theme is the one endlessly inculcated by John Terraine and now finding wider acceptance among military historians: that the British Army’s great series of victories in 1918 should be seen as the ‘pay-off’ for lessons painfully learned in the previous three years. The early British offensives, made ...”

“... transcended party politics. Of course there were exceptions. No Tory MP joined Stuart Holland and John Fraser in their criticism of the Police in Brixton, and no Labour MP supported Winston Churchill’s call for an end to immigration. Between these poles, however, there was agreement that the British Police should not arm themselves like the French CRS, that ...”

“... could transform it for posterity into an earlier version of Dunkirk. ‘To the last,’ writes John North in his 1936 history, it was ‘a singularly brainless and suicidal type of warfare.’ After the worst debacle of all, when General Stopford’s inertia threw away any chance of success in the crucial Allied landings at Suvla Bay, while the commander ...”

“... calling for reform and to that end appointed the ultra-respectable public school headmaster Sir John Wolfenden to chair it. When Wolfenden recommended that homosexual acts between consenting adults over the age of 21 should no longer be considered a crime the Report was shelved by the Home Office. In the late Fifties, however, the Homosexual Law Reform ...”

“... early bath, or shampoo. I don’t want to make too much of this hair thing. After all, there was a foot thing, too. Lots of players turned out in funny-coloured boots. I suppose hair and footwear are the only bits of themselves footballers can get to decorate without first securing permission from Fifa, or Adidas, or Nike. Metal attachments ...”

“... Verse, proprioception, Mayan glyphs, Alfred North Whitehead, a grab bag of poetic theorising. Six foot eight and wide of girth, he commanded a room. On one occasion in Berkeley, wind in his sails, he ranted on stage for more than four hours before Duncan walked out and the staff turned off the lights. Apparently Creeley would begin by making a statement or ...”

“... inspired Hilary Mantel to write a fine novel, The Giant, O’Brien, which examines the surgeon John Hunter’s avid pursuit of specimen bodies to study, the more unusual the more covetable. At the Hunterian, which is currently closed for renovation, the Irishman’s skeleton was displayed beside that of the ‘Sicilian fairy’, Caroline Crachami, only one ...”