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“... that terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion cities. Nature who made the mason, made the house.’ Here Lopez seems to disagree. To him, humankind is distinct from the natural world, fallen from its grace. In ‘Searching for Depth in Bonaire’, he ponders ‘the ordinary venality and inevitable shallowness of so much in human ...”

“... quantity, and more for observation than vision. But in 1927, 45 years after Trollope’s death, Michael Sadleir published a reassessment. He argued that Trollope was a writer with the rare gift of being able to produce memorable books without writing memorable sentences, and probe depths without seeming to move beyond the surface. Interest revived; the ...”

“... equivalent ‘little bugger’, not as cowardly a substitution as the author of this biography, Michael Snyder, seems to think. ‘Motherfucker’ was taboo, but also unfamiliar in a British context. ‘Bugger’ was a robust stand-in.Snyder starts his book with Sitwell’s epiphany but acknowledges the exaggeration behind Purdy’s claim that she had saved ...”

“... 1951, features Margaret Lockwood (best known for playing feisty period heroines opposite James Mason, who himself did Desert Island Discs in 1961 and 1981) sounding as if she’s narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be edited ...”

“... the streets, where they could be attacked by the Ripper. One of the most compelling suggestions in Michael Mason’s The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (1994) concerns 19th-century attitudes to prostitution. Previous historians had stressed that the Victorians regarded prostitution as a sink of corruption and disease to be treated, like open ...”

“... masonic lodge, displeased that The Magic Flute played fast and loose with masonic symbolism: any mason would apparently hear the three fortissimo chords that open the overture as a subliminal reference to their ceremony of initiation, which is heralded by three knocks on the temple door. The one slice of mythology about which everyone is sure – that Mozart ...”

“... Shaun Murphy, a solid player who was the world champion in 2005, named the retired footballer Michael Owen. Judd Trump, currently ranked second in the world, named the still-playing footballer Mason Mount. Mark Selby, who has been world champion four times and UK champion twice, said Nicko McBrain, the drummer from Iron ...”

“... produced’. In an essay called ‘Mythical Work’, one of Joyce’s collaborators, Michael Sonenscher, looks at the compagnonnages of 18th-century France. Journeymen in various trades practised a non-Christian ceremony of initiation into a devoir. The men concerned had overlapping skills concerned with building, furniture, leather. ‘The ...”

“... their eyes back on the pre-reform era, saw little reason to dispute its unsavoury reputation. Even Michael MacDonald, whose splen did Mystical Bedlam used the casebooks of the astrological physician and divine Richard Napier to illuminate the mental world of the 17th century, and to suggest that mental alienation and distress might then have been dealt with in ...”

“... a subterranean lake. Under the influence of Duman, and exploiting the practical skills of Sophie Mason, a garden artist and landscaper, and the person who recognised that they would need a bucket and rope to remove the soil, the collective assembled tables of archaeological finds, trophies of former lives: the usual broken clay pipes, bits of ...”

“... and writing, began to hang out together. In the summer of 1964, Jacqueline and their son Michael went to Long Island while Brian stayed in New York working on The Emperor of Ice-Cream. Frank Russell, who had won a Guggenheim for his nature writing, also left New York. Brian and Jean became lovers that summer, and not long afterwards Jacqueline and ...”

“... slanted towards the book’s central preoccupation with explaining a slaveholding worldview. Like Michael O’Brien, in his Conjectures of Order (2004), the Genoveses are exasperated with the tendency of historians to dismiss Southerners as anti-intellectual, provincial or crassly materialistic. Unlike O’Brien, they suggest that slavery was the phenomenon ...”

“... and that he may even have been an initiate of a banned Bavarian order. If Hegel really was a Mason, then he would have taken the greatest care to conceal it, and D’Hondt, prodding us with sheafs of exclamation marks, asks us not to spoil the pleasures of plausible conjecture by unreasonable demands for direct evidence! Terry Pinkard is the author of ...”

“... specify who my fellow modèles en gâteaux might be – the late Freddie Trueman I would guess, Michael Parkinson possibly and Alan Titchmarsh (who’s so amiable he might even do it). A candidate for pâtisserie posterity would once have been that son of Yorkshire Jimmy Savile who seemed made from marzipan. But not now. No cake for James.7 ...”

“... a stickler’s commitment to detail, complete with flourishes and stylised impatience à la Perry Mason – a characteristic that becomes less mannered as he runs out of time in a cross-examination. Then, too, he does good deadpan and good put-upon. When Halit Berisha, an Albanian municipal official from Suva Reka, in the north of Kosovo, testified about the ...”