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“... people whose accents and bearing remind him of the place he knows best. When he was still being held in relatively civilised conditions in Pakistan at the start of his captivity, when he still imagined an imminent release, he was relieved to see two MI5 agents, a man and a woman, simply because they were British, until he realised they weren’t going to ...”

“... painted glass. Iconoclasm fights idolatry, but reform meets resistance from traditional custom, held dear by the commons – the same ‘very simple and unlearned people’ whose souls Cranmer would save from ‘beads, pardons, pilgrimages and such other like popery’, but who crave earthly sustenance, protection and fairness.The story begins with ...”

“... of the university was begun on the family’s estate in Palo Alto.It opened in 1891. Classes were held in the Quad, but to anyone visiting at the time the educational mission would have seemed secondary to the commemorative. There was a Memorial Church, a Memorial Arch, a museum for Leland Jr’s bric-à-brac – jade bird, beaded necklace – and a mausoleum ...”

“... Exchange Building. In 1993, one man, George Heron, had been acquitted of her murder; now another, David Boyd, was about to stand trial.In 1992, Sunderland’s shipyards had closed down, Monkwearmouth colliery was about to be mothballed and, though Liebherr cranes still tilted their long necks across the docks, and Nissan was mass-producing Primeras and Micras ...”

“... not enough to confirm the greatness of greatness; we want to know our business with the dead. David Marr unfolds it, steadily, over seven hundred pages. The first vindication of his huge and wonderful book is that it offers ways into all of White’s work, uncovering materials which were taken up and transformed in the making of the novels, the stories ...”

“... notes and drawings he had made of English Gothic, English brickwork and warehouse construction. David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann have edited these notes, interleaving them with Schinkel’s letters home to his wife and they have added contemporary illustrations from other sources, showing places and artifacts referred to in the text. Enhanced by the two ...”

“... the beginning of the century, and Dora Carrington might have had the good luck to stay ordinary. David Garnett, introducing his selection of letters, felt that the reader might ask: ‘Who was this woman Carrington?’ She derived her importance from the fact that she lived with Lytton Strachey. Hostesses, he went on, like the Asquiths and Lady Colefax, who ...”

“... place of sport in the ‘common people’s’ life went unnoticed by historians who had no doubt held games in contempt from the days when they had stood, cold, defiantly cerebral and inadequate, in the outfield at their public schools and watched the hearties monopolising the acclaim. What these historians might have recognised was the significance of the ...”

“... another socialist doctor, Leslie Haden Guest, who later became a Labour MP. Her second husband, David Eder, also a doctor, ‘was one of the first English medical men to fall under the influence of Freud’ and to disseminate his ideas. A Zionist of the mild kind, he envisaged a Jewish State as part of the British Empire. The Eders’ house was ‘a meeting ...”

“... Just under forty years ago David Erdman provided for William Blake historical contexts in abundance in Blake: Prophet against Empire (1954). It was a remarkable work of literary detection, which still dominates the field. Some Blake readers have felt that his attribution of correspondence between text and contemporaneous events was over-literal (as well as hazardous), and Jon Mee is one of these ...”

“... all, as one could hope to find but he is more interested in Society and the immense fascination it held for a wider public, suggesting that it had taken over some of the roles Bagehot had attributed to the monarchy – above all, suborning the populace with shows of wealth, glamour and pomp. But the upper class proper, a mixture of nobility and great ...”

“... and unfit houses’ in Manchester, 15,000 in Oldham, 5000 in Rochdale and 80,000 in Liverpool. David Kynaston cites these figures in his new book, On the Cusp: Days of ’62.* Reading them, I immediately wondered about the figure for Glasgow, and I found it in Michael Pacione’s history of the city. There were 97,000 houses in Glasgow awaiting demolition ...”

“... and his text shows more than a passing resemblance to other, better, secondary sources – David Robertson’s George Mallory, Walt Unsworth’s Everest, Peter Hopkirk’s Trespassers on the Roof of the World, Audrey Salkeld and Tom Holzel’s Mystery of Mallory & Irvine. By contrast, Last Climb is not only well written, it derives authority from the ...”

“... and low taxation, many of its elderly members – and some of its politicians – have long held to a more cautious ethos of middle-class respectability, restraint and downright frugality. In theory, these Conservatives wished to roll back the restrictions of the socialist state; in practice, many of them reckoned that wartime rationing had been good ...”

“... a road novel midway and ends with a sloppy orgy in the Texas desert. The ever ironical narrator, David Bell, is fond of making statements like ‘I was an extremely handsome young man,’ and worships at the altar of Burt Lancaster: ‘Burt in the moonlight was a crescendo of male perfection but no less human because of it.’ ‘I don’t think my first ...”