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“... and architectural reformers rally round to invent. This year marks the centenary of Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, perhaps the most humane blueprint ever set down for new communities. Go today to Letchworth, the first Garden City and fruit of Howard’s urbanistic fancies, and what do you ...”

“... seemed to grace half the magazine covers on any rack. He seemed hotter and more unstoppable than Howard Dean had during the early part of the 2004 presidential primaries, before the press and electronic media decided to destroy his candidacy. Dean frightened people, the people who count: he was principled, stubborn and unpredictable. Obama doesn’t frighten ...”

“... struggles, or was brought about by the cataclysm of 1914-1918. Another article, by Christopher Howard, details the Labour Party’s failure in the 1920s to expand local organisation and mass membership. It was the familiar story of small dedicated groups whose exertions ‘bore no little resemblance to the labours of Sisyphus’, and frustration fanned the ...”

“... the wisdom of Kissinger’s policies in South America and South-East Asia was in cahoots with Jane Fonda and possibly the Kremlin. On the issue of Watergate, Levin went on proclaiming Nixon’s innocence when even Rabbi Korff must have been thinking about giving up. Compared to what the Russians got up to, Levin argued, Watergate was nothing. From his ...”

“... Despite the Victorians’ enthusiasm for weeping over the beheadings of Anne Boleyn or Lady Jane Grey (perhaps a deliberate attempt to embrace a Protestant alternative to Mary’s Popish pathos), the British have in general preferred their emblematic women to remain in one piece. Britannia and her latter-day personifications are supposed to rule the ...”

“... was giving up fiction. He had already experimented with drama, in the play Happy birthday, Wanda Jane. Vonnegut did not give up fiction. He returned to it three years later with Slapstick, and the result suggested to the critics that there had been no renewal after the mid-career crisis of Breakfast of Champions. Slapstick even contains brief reappearances ...”

“... and the Pole family and other English grandees grouped themselves about the incoming queen, Jane Seymour. If Margaret played any part in the downfall of Henry’s second queen, her role was so far behind the scenes that it has left no trace. But in late June she was back at court by the side of Queen Jane, and the ...”

“... James: A Biography (1980); Ruth Bernard Yeazell in The Death and Letters of Alice James (1981); Howard Feinstein in Becoming William James (1984); Gerald Myers in William James: His Life and Thought (1986); Jane Maher in Biography of Broken Fortunes: Wilky and Bob, Brothers of William, Henry and Alice James ...”

“... underappreciated in the States, rarely goes beyond perplexity and adulation. A typical sentence is Howard Moss’s ‘How Schuyler manages to be absolutely truthful and an obsessed romantic at the same time is his secret.’ Well, perhaps the critic should have tried harder to get it out of him. Lee Harwood in his afterword to Schuyler’s Last Poems enthuses ...”

“... response to one of the few occasions when a disability materialises as an aspect of the hero. Howard Breslin’s short story ‘Bad Day at Honda’ has an explicitly able-bodied protagonist, while Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) is famously one-armed. All Norden can think of to say is that Tracy’s character is ‘“remasculated” through ...”

“... project began with noble intentions, at least on the part of one of its two founders. Jane Pearce was a public-spirited Texan from a prominent Austin family with department store money on one side and intellectual distinction on the other (her father was an academic and prison reformer). After qualifying as a doctor, she went to New York to train ...”

“... seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his love of Howard Hawks, perhaps the perfect no-brow. The clue to Hawks’s greatness is that this sombre lining is cut against the cloth of the genre in which he is operating. Far from the meek purveyor of Hollywood forms, he always chose to turn them upside down. To Have ...”

“... that got him the offer to come to Hollywood and make a picture for RKO. The Martian script was by Howard Koch, who would later work on Casablanca and The Letter, but everyone always knew that Welles’s contribution was central. He had advised Koch to employ the present tense and let the story unfold as a piece of live radio: it would leak out, a string of ...”

“... Mary Braddon, for example, best-selling author of Lady Audley’s Secret and a bohemian variant on Jane Eyre, went to live with the publisher John Maxwell, who had ‘five children, and a wife in an Irish lunatic asylum’; after 13 years the wife died and she could at last marry him. It is little wonder that she was interested in bigamy. There is a good deal ...”

“... and we get the grandmasters of the trade, such as Patrick Collinson on Elizabeth I, Michael Howard on Sir John Hackett, Eric Hobsbawm on Karl Marx (well, he lived here for thirty years, and undeniably ‘influenced the nation’s life’). Also impressive is how frequently those who have already written the authoritative intellectual biography have been ...”