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“... featuring several famous figures – among them, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King. At its centre, though, five times the size of the others, is a stern-looking man with bushy, neatly parted grey hair, wearing a frock-coat and necktie. Two hundred years after his birth into slavery, Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and writer once ...”

“... of that, and the Express in particular is down on its luck. In the days of Hugh Cudlipp and Cecil King, the Mirror was a wonder to us all – slick, successful and serious about its politics. Its journalists and layout men buzzed round Hugh Gaitskell, seeking to burnish the Labour Party’s shabby image. Now, in 1987, Captain Maxwell does his best when not ...”

“... It would be interesting to place Jay McInerney and David Holbrook as neighbours at E.M. Forster’s imaginary table. Both novelists are fascinated by decadence – that much they have in common. But their diagnoses and anatomies of the decadent condition are quite different; worlds apart, to use Holbrook’s dominant image ...”

“... outstripped anyone’s claim to possess their own story. Here he is writing to his oldest friend, David Peltz, who is thinly fictionalised as Woody Selbst in the story ‘A Silver Dish’ and as George Swiebel in Humboldt’s Gift. ‘What matters,’ Bellow wrote to Peltz when he complained of being used, is that good things get written … We’ve known ...”

“... those of 1945, 1964 and 1997; neither has found any inspiration in 1924 or 1929. Peter Clark and David Torrance both set out to reassert the political importance of the 1924 government and to restore the place of its senior figures in the history of the Labour Party. Both focus on high politics, and in particular the way the members of the first Labour ...”

“... Russians around the Black Sea coast – two decades earlier, the ambitious young British diplomat David Urquhart had been sacked for making such an attempt in Circassia, just east of the Crimea, which Russia was then trying to subjugate. British and French caution reflected an anxiety that a Balkan war of nationalities would destroy Ottoman rule. At the 1856 ...”

“... David Solkin​ ’s new book is designed to replace Painting in Britain 1530-1790, a volume of the Pelican history of art by Ellis Waterhouse, which was first published in 1953 and appeared in five separate editions, the last in 1994, nine years after Waterhouse’s death. Waterhouse’s history was quickly recognised as a classic ...”

“... in his Bromley and Chislehurst constituency. A couple of months earlier, another Conservative MP, David Morris, apologised for lobbying on behalf of an energy firm that had given him £10,000. Morris had urged the energy minister, Kwasi Kwarteng, to lobby Ofgem to change regulations in ways that could benefit Aquind Limited, which is seeking to build an ...”

“... politics on the fringes of the right. Its CEO, Philippa Stroud, a Conservative peer, is married to David Stroud, founder of the charismatic megachurch network Christ Church London. Members of the advisory board include the Republican House Speaker, Mike Johnson; the failed Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who called the 6 January insurrection ...”

“... of the ‘National Bibliographic Service Organisational Chart’; ‘Boston Spa Director General David Russon viewing new digital storage and transmission equipment’ (‘Director General’! – Gogol lives); the conveyor channels of the new ‘Mechanical Book Handling System’ (tactfully, the Electric Dutch shelves which ran amok compacting their ...”

“... This in turn might go some way to explaining his psychopathic, prurient hatred for Martin Luther King. Hoover was compulsive in his taping and bugging of King’s highly virile private life, and in his campaign to use the tapes for blackmail. He officiated in the twisted plan to send ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”

“... terribly wrong. In 61 BC, for example, in the triumph of Pompey the Great – then victorious over King Mithridates, though later defeated by his arch-rival Julius Caesar in the civil wars of the early 40s BC – the extravagance of the artwork proved counterproductive in the eyes of some. In his encyclopedic Natural History, Pliny the Elder gleefully bemoaned ...”

“... of the New York School, but was a Platonist at heart: ‘One must live in sovereign freedom like a king,’ she declared, quoting Pasternak. Here she distinguished herself from her contemporaries: poets like Robert Creeley, Jack Spicer and Paul Blackburn often harked back to fraternal tropes of the knight, troubadour, jongleur. Never ...”

“... in the grass behind his dugout. He arrived in France as a willing, if not eager, officer of the king. By autumn, however, he understood that the death that had overtaken a steady stream of his comrades was highly likely to come to him too. In one pathetic note to my grandfather, at that time a popular playwright, he asked him to try to use his influence to ...”