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“... of bogus erudition – the Brexit white paper was, he said, ‘the greatest vassalage since King John paid homage to Philip II at Le Goulet in 1200’ – and he must have enjoyed expressing his hope that it would ‘not be necessary for Her Majesty’s stay at Sandringham to be interrupted by her in person having to prorogue Parliament’. Speaking the next ...”

“... English housing and town planning. In other English buildings the influence is direct. Colin St John Wilson was a friend and admirer. Sources for the steep roofs, the vertical accent (the clock tower), the plain brick walls, wave-profiles in entrance hall ceilings and the careful modulation of light in the reading rooms ...”

“... made of it than either the waters or their meeting deserve.’ This is the English travel writer John Barrow writing of the Vale of Avoca in 1835. Like him, I find it hard to decide on the register of the phrase, so lyrical as a song title, so grandiloquent as a synonym for ‘confluence’; unlike Barrow, I find these meetings fascinating, but I don’t ...”

“... Promenade Concerts were founded towards the close of the 19th century, shortly after the Queen’s Hall opened as a new musical venue in 1893. As such, they may be regarded as a classic instance of what is sometimes called ‘invented tradition’, where venerable antiquity is less in evidence than is often popularly supposed; and where change and adaptation ...”

“... the 19th and 20th centuries. He wrote outstanding biographies of such Liberal leaders as Asquith, John Morley and Haldane, concluding with A.G. Gardiner, long-time editor of the Daily News. He then gave up political biography and wrote an enormous two-volume work on The Rise and Fall of the Political Press in Britain. It is difficult enough to write the ...”

“... a nice little earner in applied pessimism. Blame it on my childhood. Where the Eaglescliffe Hall now is, God alone knows. I couldn’t trace it in Lloyd’s Register, but it may have been renamed. At best, ships live half as long as humans, and it would now be 38 years old. I was at its launch in October 1956: the photo shows me in school cap and ...”

“... to have some justification. Yet it is rarely so obviously justified as in the case of Professor John Elliott’s rediscovery of a major Spanish statesman of the 17th century, the effective ruler of Spain for more than twenty years and the contemporary, the rival and the opponent of Cardinal Richelieu. A choleric man, obsessed with honour and reputation, it ...”

“... his book Practical Criticism he attracted audiences so large they couldn’t fit into the lecture hall. In the course of a career that allowed him plenty of time for reading and writing – he wasn’t one to be corralled into administrative duties – Griffiths published only a monograph about Victorian poetry and, in collaboration with Matthew Reynolds, an ...”

“... unmentionables to the translators. Mrs Sucksby will fence the wipers, the repeater and the pins. No great risk. The garrotting panic and legislation against footpads is still two years away. It’s Liberty Hall on the London streets in 1860. They walk down to St James’s. Nothing. Normally Caroline’s had her nancy ...”

“... I begin to write about John Martin: Apocalypse (at Tate Britain until 15 January) before looking at the pictures. Maybe, I say to myself, if I set memories of Martin’s pictures against the words in the catalogue (Tate, £19.99), if I learn what he achieved in more than a century and a half of (variable) success, I’ll find that we owe his memory some kind of apology ...”

“... There was no shortage of bastards in the early 16th century, but Thomas Cromwell stands out as one of the biggest bastards of them all. His surviving correspondence shows the energy, efficiency and brutality of someone born to get things done. Whenever he says, ‘I remain still your perfect and sincere friend,’ you can be fairly sure he is about to terminate the addressee’s career with extreme prejudice ...”

“... facts’ are said to speak for themselves, and ameliorative policies become an obligation which no humane society can avoid and still hope to hold its head high in the civilised world. One might naturally take the heyday of this style of thinking to be the period between 1960 and 1980. Levels of economic growth in the early part of the period helped to ...”

“... scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is said to be effectual in ...”

“... John Betjeman was the voice of postwar Englishness: at best, humorous, quirky and enthusiastic about some of the oddest things; at worst, parochial and smug shading into bitter. How ironic, in view of later developments and the argument of Timothy Mowl’s book, that Nikolaus Pevsner’s first visit to England, in 1930, was to research a new topic: Englishness in art ...”

“... them: Dickens was a magician in another sense, the sense that goes with the melodrama and music hall, and tribal magicians are not creators as Dickens and Hardy were. They do not invent a whole natural world of their own in which the client can lead a solitary life; their appeal has something communal, as the Borges image suggests, and the shareability of a ...”