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“... to the mark. All the tropical products except cotton were deleterious or, at best, useless. As in Richard Dunn’s book, we are given gruesome details about the vicious, often sadistic regime of the plantations which produced them. Speaking of the Antigua revolt of 1736, Calder discusses, as others have been doing lately, the general puzzle of whether raw ...”

“... glow. These are not the uncorseted, feelgood ramblings of Sixties survivors (Howard Marks, Richard Neville et al), but the in-your-face, out-of-your-skull, trust-nobody, swallow-anything limbo that acted, it has become clear, as a curtain-raiser to the free-market excesses that were to follow. Punk auditioned the dark night of Keith Joseph and Norman ...”

“... literature produced by functionaries of the British Empire – Mungo Park on Central Africa, James Cook and Joseph Banks on the Pacific Islands, William Jones on India – and shared their assumptions about civilisational development. Progress was measured by the extent to which a society exploited its land efficiently, and by the relative predominance of ...”

“... the Independent Group, the extraordinary band of young artists, architects and critics (including Richard Hamilton, Peter and Alison Smithson, and Lawrence Alloway, among others) who developed, from within the Modernist Institute of Contemporary Art, a Pop sensibility of their own. His revised dissertation, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, made his ...”

“... and Lady Colefax, who welcomed Strachey, ‘would no more have invited Carrington than the cook’. Knowing her very well, he thought she was a complex and original character in a strange situation, but did not say what effect on her the strange situation had. Dora Carrington was born in 1893, the daughter of an engineer in the East Indian ...”

“... The word ‘meme’, popularised by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene, has recently gained entry into the OED as ‘an element of a culture that may be considered to be passed on by non-genetic means, esp. imitation’. But the idea that culture is transmitted by imitation and learning in a manner analogous but not reducible to natural selection has been around for a long time, and many other terms have been used in describing it ...”

“... on the university novel, explores the intricate web of relationships which form around Mina Cook, an undergraduate at a fictional Oxford college.Two Thousand Million Man-Power (1937), the fifth novel Trevelyan published, is something else again. Robert Thomas, recently graduated from the School of Chemistry and Mathematics at London University, gets a ...”

“... hack’s best hope of getting into newsprint. There was, for example, fulsome coverage for Robin Cook (Derek Raymond) once he had gone; local colour pieces (memory tapes from the Coach and Horses) outweighing the tepid inches of a life-time’s review space. Cook, that most civilised of men, most troubled of writers, was ...”

“... nieces and nephews, this person sent money home every week to South America, that person loved to cook – began to make me realise, day after day, and in a more than abstract way, how many lives make five thousand, and how indiscriminate death really is. The notices recall simple things, presumably the things that the bereaved wished to report. Though it is ...”

“... the Bay Area. They remained together, with variations on the theme, for fifty years. Thom liked to cook, as Auden also recommends, although almost certainly not on account of that recommendation. He wasn’t a greatly gifted cook (he was, after all an Englishman, and an Englishman of a particular generation), but he was more ...”

“... and seems to have written a proportion of it off on condition that when Margaret was old enough to cook for him he would come back and marry her. This Hardyesque bargain was made good in 1903, when Albert was 39 and Margaret twenty. It pleased nobody for long. The Fenns despised the Bayleys for being in trade and Albert’s sisters were critical of Margaret ...”

“... effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the jury, that the Commander-in Chief’s Official Report on the Falklands War had been tampered with behind his back, in relation to the crucial timing of the contact between HMS ...”

“... good material for a more scholarly examination of such matters. So while the gardener and the cook in me found many points of interest, the historian found herself bristling with questions, almost all of which remained unanswered. How did the head gardener actually turn a ‘common field’ into a paradise? What tools and landscaping machinery were or ...”

“... they thought of the shooting. They all said they approved of it, and one man said he was off to cook a chicken in celebration. A month later the attacks have spread to the centre of Baghdad. I was waiting outside the National Museum, where the CPA had arranged a brief showing of the 3000-year-old golden treasure of Nimrud, whisked for the occasion from the ...”

“... set in the Middle Ages; bicycled around France studying its medieval architecture; hero-worshipped Richard the Lionheart; rubbed medieval brasses; was fascinated by medieval heraldry, glass, coins and weapons; wrote his undergraduate thesis on crusader castles (his introduction to ‘Arabia’); and, before the war came along to interrupt his academic ...”