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“... the big imperial powers. The mutiny on the Bounty ruined a mission in imperial botany: Lieutenant William Bligh’s task had been to secure breadfruit trees from Tahiti, then carry them to the Caribbean to provide cheap food for slaves on the sugar-cane plantations. (The trees got to the Caribbean on a second Royal Navy breadfruit voyage in 1793.) The theory ...”

“... Gandhi. A little group of us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the ...”

“... grandiose electrical experiments at Wardenclyffe Tower on Long Island. His proposal for a ‘death ray’ – a kind of anti-aircraft rail gun firing tungsten pellets, highly impractical and in any case hardly a weapon of mass destruction – didn’t appear for another 25 years. And on the day of the explosion Robert Peary’s crew were in New York, where ...”

“... of the Royal Society, or keen antiquarians, notably his aged patron, the great naturalist John Ray. Some of his informants – East India Company factors, missionaries in the colonies or Arctic whalers – supplied Sloane and his staff with individual curios or titbits of gossip: flamingo tongues ‘fit for a prince’s table’, a walrus head, maggots ...”

“... Labour could be the party of green hopes and aims. ‘The future of socialism may lie more with William Morris than with Herbert Morrison,’ Robin Cook said in 1987. Morris died over ninety years ago, but remains wise and relevant for his insistence on combining social justice with a respect for nature. Can the Left recover his kind of vision, and can it ...”

“... as Donald Howard is now doing, writing an account not of Chaucer but of the Chaucer era, ‘an X-ray moving picture of how our epoch was created from the medieval’, as he puts it, echoing Kenner on Pound. To do that with Cervantes would be to make a genuine attempt to advance our understanding of a great writer, a great period of Spanish art, and a key ...”

“... depicting Hollywood’s own wild party. The paradigm of all movies about Hollywood is probably William Wellman’s 1937 melodrama A Star is Born, which has been remade twice as a musical and was itself based on George Cukor’s What Price Hollywood? of 1932. The basic story contrasts the inexorable rise to stardom of an unassuming waitress with the fall ...”

“... knowing the origin of the substance in front of you, inorganic slime can often seem part of what William Ian Miller, in The Anatomy of Disgust (1997), called ‘the organic world of generative rot … life soup, fecundity itself’. For most of history, as Lehoux points out, spontaneous generation was a fact, not a theory. The distinction between muddy slime ...”

“... care ‘reform’.When I want to recall those Leckford Road days, I can turn up a letter that William Jefferson Clinton wrote, on 3 December 1969, to a certain Colonel Holmes of the University of Arkansas Reserve Officers Training Corps. Clinton wanted to clarify his attitude to the military draft:Let me try to explain. As you know, I worked for two years ...”

“... word-games while the language burns’; nor do I find it an accurate or fair representation of William Labov’s work to describe him as ‘legitimising illiteracy’. In each of these cases the charge relates to a single example, which may have prompted a transient and ill-considered response. It does appear, however, that Hughes generally prefers the ...”

“... Press Association. No sound-bite was more factitious than this, only shorter. When the People’s William went on the stump, he was well aware that he was speaking not only to the thousands who attended his meetings – yes, even in Sheffield – but to the millions who only read about them. Professional football was catching on as a spectator sport in much ...”

“... movement as Congressman Larry McDonald (head of the John Birch Society), Fred and Phyllis Schafly, Ray Cline (former deputy-director of the CIA), General Daniel Graham (now leader of the High Frontier – i.e. Star Wars – lobby) and Reed Irvine. Irvine brought a fresh raft of influential supporters into the Moonie milieu with his Accuracy in Media ...”

“... killing the wife who betrayed him while he was at war. The murderer in Chandler’s script was the William Bendix character, Ladd’s war buddy, an amnesiac killer suffering from blackouts: playing Smerdyakov to Alan Ladd’s Ivan Karamazov, Bendix, as Chandler puts it, ‘executed his pal’s wife’. Although the studio invented another murderer ex machina ...”

“... by E.S. Goodrich, who was (like M.D. Hill, one of his science masters at Eton) a disciple of Edwin Ray Lankester and a believer in natural selection at a time when other modes of evolution seemed to many equally, if not more, persuasive (saltationism, for example, which held evolutionary changes to be abrupt, or neo-Lamarckism, the idea that an organism’s ...”

“... of the Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre is not existential Brighton with Kylie Minogue and Ray Winstone onboard. For survivors of a century that witnessed the birth and death of both cinema and automobile cultures, the only reliable measure of time is the partial recall of films we have experienced. And it’s not where we were when we heard about the ...”