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“... Cathy leaves home to live in a squat, and Sheila manages through spirited perseverance to get her foot back in the door of Walton Lane. But the action of Present Times seems to be there less for itself than for the opportunity it provides for dialogue, and the book does not develop organically but through a string of set-piece arguments, mutual animadversions ...”

“... husband’s poems. In such cases writing does in a sense become a ‘genuinely social activity’. John Clare’s dealings with his publisher Taylor provide a variation on this theme. Clare’s peculiar circumstances resulted in revisions that were necessarily ‘social’, but modern editors have a persistent tendency to revert to the earliest unsocial ...”

“... Voorhees’s study is different. He highlights the all-important fact that in October 1962 John F. Kennedy was about to face congressional midterm elections. The results would determine the fate of his presidency, as well as his prospects for re-election in 1964. Kennedy’s New Frontier domestic agenda – which promised a huge house-building ...”

“... that had won the referendum by recasting the choice as one between the people’s will and a foot-dragging establishment, and hired Dominic Cummings, the architect of that strategy, to win a general election for him. He promised not only to get Brexit done, but to ‘level up’ the country in order to reward the constituencies that had voted for it, and ...”

“... militant ally in Britain, crossed to Torbay in November 1688 with a force of 4000 horse and 11,000 foot and marched on London – the last successful invasion of England. James, deserted by his generals at Salisbury, fled the country. Pretty much as had happened in 1660 before the reinstatement of Charles II, a parliament convened without a royal summons ...”

“... edges of the known world, medieval travellers encountered creatures who held a single giant foot over their head as a makeshift parasol and fearsome hybrids with eyes peering out from their chests or set in the middle of their foreheads: they were classed as wonders, close kin to the monsters and dragons of classical genealogies. When Thomas Browne was ...”

“... travel for ‘ladies’). This absence is exacerbated in the recent reprints, which have retained John Craxton’s characteristic cover designs, but omitted the arresting black and white photographs taken by Joan that were included in the first editions. Despite all this, Mani and Roumeli remain extraordinarily engaging books. This is partly thanks to Leigh ...”

“... shed light on the violent groups that peppered working-class communities and provided the foot soldiers for New York’s Democratic Party. Most subsequent accounts construed the Dead Rabbit-Bowery Boy Riot as the most violent in a string of battles between Irish and nativist gangs and an extension of the struggle between Mayor Wood and the politicians ...”

“... were also applied to discussions about politics, race and economic utility. Hegel never set foot in South America but described the Amazon as ‘monstrous’ and compared it unfavourably to the Mississippi Valley, which had allowed a harmonious civil society to take root. George Kennan, who did visit South America, used what he imagined to be the ...”

“... who had been killed by a Valmara or had stepped on a small pressure mine and was missing a foot or the lower part of a leg. I used to tell this story as an illustration of the resilience of ordinary Kurds in their long struggle against poverty and oppression. For almost a century the Kurds had been savagely treated: first by the British in the ...”

“... In the spring of 1974, as reports multiplied of his involvement with crooks such as John Poulson and T. Dan Smith, Reginald Maudling disappeared to Paris with his wife, Beryl. The Daily Mail’s Harry Longmuir had little difficulty locating him in the ‘Président’ suite of the George V. Checking in himself, Longmuir spent a whole Sunday morning with a confused, disorientated Maudling in his dressing-gown ...”

“... Unity. A visitor to Swinbrook, the family home, reported that the second anyone put their foot through the door, Decca and Unity would appear, demanding: ‘Are you a Fascist or a Communist?’ When this particular guest answered, ‘Neither – I’m a democrat,’ they sniffed in unison, ‘How wet!’ and wandered off. Interestingly, after the ...”

“... Body. The serial stuff-strutters include the photo-artists Gilbert & George, Cindy Sherman and John Coplans; the sculptors Jeff Koons, Antony Gormley and Marc Quinn; the painters Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville; the performance and video artists Joseph Beuys, Rebecca Horn, Bruce Nauman, Arnulf Rainer and Matthew Barney. Their work commonly ...”

“... held in a cell below the tide line. His cell fills up with seawater twice a day, leaving only a foot of air in which to breathe. His jailer, Pobjoy, brings him scraps of tattered parchment, on which he paints clichéd ‘scenes of bucolick bliss’. Pobjoy sells the paintings for his own profit, but Gould hoards enough of the materials to write his illegal ...”

“... humour was born in the trenches. Oscar Wilde’s clever formulations no longer sufficed. The five-foot-two eyes-of-blue Charleston danced by the ‘It’ generation required a leg position as awkward as the knock-kneed pose of Nijinsky’s corps de ballet. The madcap crazes of the 1920s, the frenetic club culture and the incidence of social deviance were a ...”