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“... in New York in 1915. His father, Bennett Siegelstein, who had grown up (alongside Eddie Cantor and David Sarnoff) on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, was a prominent lawyer, as well as the founder and former chairman of the Menorah Home and Hospital for the Aged in Brooklyn. He had championed Romanian Jews, held seders, and sent the poor Jewish children of the ...”

“... look into a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe. In front of her, between her and us, there is a wooden block surrounded by ...”

“... when the president of General Electric introduced his successor to the press, and neither man was wearing a tie. Hollander expressed surprise and concern to the New York Times. ‘Ever since the Middle Ages,’ she observed, ‘powerful men have covered their throats.’ The anthropologist David Givens, coiner of the ...”

“... Indeed, Dr Reynolds gives us rather less, in the way of personal detail, than the recent study by David Coombes. There is far less about Sayers’s marriage, for example; but we do not feel – at any rate, I did not feel – that this is a case of suppressio veri. More an exercise in getting things in perspective. Yes, Sayers was a vicar’s daughter who ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... Becoming a British citizen is a significant life event,’ the former home secretary David Blunkett writes. ‘The government intends to make gaining British citizenship meaningful and celebratory rather than simply a bureaucratic process.’ The quote is not from Blunkett’s diaries but from the funniest book currently available in the English language, published by the Home Office, and called Life in the United Kingdom: A Journey to Citizenship ...”

“... that he rebuked ministers who were working twenty hours a day to win the war because they were wearing the wrong hats. At official meetings, they were treated to a lengthy and often stentorian royal monologue, usually ill-ordered and thought-out, which permitted them no time for a question or comment. Asquith thought a royal audience on a par with having a ...”

“... interested in arguments about whether lockdowns are a mistake, or whether the enforcement of mask-wearing is pointless, or over the balance between protecting livelihoods and protecting lives. The people here believed in a malignant hidden hand behind everything that was happening and everything that has ever happened. They denied that the virus was real. For ...”

“... in glass, paintings and sculpture, and the parallels with the Virgin Mary, who was often portrayed wearing a crown and interceding before Christ, lent status to queens, and helped them to wield power. In material terms, their power derived from their own households and entourages, and from their resources in land and money which enabled the distribution of ...”

“... In the mid-17th century Quakers went ‘naked for a sign’, but they often turn out to have been wearing sackcloth coats – ‘naked’ here means without shoes, hats or outer garments. Men and women both wore smocks, and you could be ‘naked in your smock’. (There was no ‘underwear’, so everyone was naked under their smocks.) People did not take ...”

“... drought; recession. The place must sound a mess. It has indeed changed. Today the school-children wearing ‘bashers’ (panama hats) in the streets of Harare are black as well as white. State television urges us ‘Towards a New Social Order’ where previously stern-faced white women would lecture us about security. (South Africa is invariably on Zimbabwean ...”

“... column marches over a pile of skulls, a mass grave. Among the perpetrators is a pig-faced soldier wearing a Star of David and a helmet with ‘Mossad’ written on it. In the background stands a man with sidelocks, a crooked nose, bloodshot eyes and fangs for teeth. He is dressed in a suit, chewing on a cigar and ...”

“... A girl suddenly runs out of one of the houses, looking backwards, obviously terrified. She is wearing only a slip and pants, and high heels – a nice touch. Her father appears at the door, asking what the matter is. She says she’s fine, although she manifestly isn’t. She dashes back into the house, comes out again with her handbag, gets into the ...”

“... demanded by the hurricane-like imminence of a thickset general, obviously of high rank, wearing enormous horn-rimmed spectacles. He had just burst from a flagged staff-car almost before it had drawn up by the kerb. Now he tore up the steps of the building at the charge, exploding through the inner door into the hall. An extraordinary current of ...”

“... followed by lookalikes of the queen, Batman and the pope, among others. When Elton arrived, he was wearing an outfit covered in white marabou feathers – the trousers as well as the jacket – and matching hat. Four hundred white doves were meant to fly out of the grand pianos. (When they didn’t, Reid and Taupin ran around scaring the birds, which ...”