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“... told him: ‘They’re made up. But that doesn’t mean they’re not true.’ The grandfather, David Cartwright, aka the Old Bastard or OB for short, knows what he’s talking about, as he was the power behind the throne at the Park for decades. The grandson, River Cartwright, once a promising recruit at the Park, has just been relegated to a dead-end job ...”

“... rap artist of Eritrean descent, was listening to a podcast during a cigarette break on the Maiden Lane Estate in Camden, where he lived. Some Police Community Support Officers (PCSOs) confronted him and insisted on carrying out a ‘welfare check’. Suleiman ignored them and walked off. The community support officers pursued him across the estate, having ...”

“... wanted to find a job in Droitwich or Worcester, but the only position he was offered was at Colley Lane School in Cradley Heath, a town in the industrial Black Country west of Birmingham – a twenty-mile train ride from Droitwich that took him into an alien world for which he was totally unprepared. Disraeli had once described Cradley Heath as the ‘Hell ...”

“... David Kohn opens his monumental Darwinian Heritage with a deftly-delivered kick, observing that a study of the wider institutional culture of Darwin’s day seems to be ‘beyond the present ken of historians of 19th-century biology’. It’s a well-aimed blow. Little of the Darwin industry’s capital has been spent on exploring evolution in its social context ...”

“... Gerald Ronson will have found. Any hopes of an honour or title will have crumbled.’ Even Lord Lane could be forgiven for thinking it pretty rich to be called a dinosaur by the judge who jailed Michelle Renshaw for being too scared to give evidence and who sent Tracey Scott to prison for six months with her baby for letting her friends take goods through ...”

“... nexus, in favour of Spartan purity. The unlikely father of the ‘white cube effect’ was Casper David Friedrich, whose studio’s one ornament was a T-square dangling from the wall, a reminder of honest German craftsmanship in keeping with his penchant for woodwork and frame-design. Of course, Friedrich’s brand of mystical pietism was partly responsible ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... is reproduced on the dust-jacket of Marvell and Liberty, a collection of essays which, like David Norbrook’s recent Writing the English Republic, chimes with the discontent that a significant percentage of British people now feels about the monarchy. That sense of friendship, of a shared and living republican culture, is present in Melville’s many ...”

“... All we’ve got now, apparently, are the truncated versions – Grove Street in Oxford, Grape Lane in York. Naturally, Francis Grose’s entry in his Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue gets furious disapproval: ‘The second edition (1788), incredibly and offensively, defined cunt, or c**t, as “a nasty name for a nasty thing”.’ Decent writing, of ...”

“... was built 20 years before Zion and was a good deal more discreet. Tucked away at the top of Chapel Lane, which runs uphill from the High Street, it was, VCH tells me, a mud-walled house built in the garden of a tinker convert. Bethesda is long gone, as are the next-door Bethesda Buildings, where Charles and Henry’s parents, Thomas and ...”

“... for taxation purposes. Everybody had to report to his own family town. Joseph, a descendant of David, accordingly travelled from Nazareth in Galilee, where he was then living, to Bethlehem in Judaea, and here his betrothed wife Mary gave birth to her son Jesus. The scholars, both of yesterday and today, including A.N. Wilson, tell us that there was no ...”

“... life are tellingly invoked. Then there is an amazingly learned search for the sources of David’s Oath of the Horatii. The trail leads through Gluck, Garrick, the ballet-master Noverre, Lavoisier, Beaumarchais and (less of a displaced person now, than when Wind was writing in 1941) Salieri. It is nard to imagine a reader with any developed interest ...”

“... through Stamford. Watch for lanes being closed between exits 9 and 7. It’s blocking at least one lane ’til six a.m. Once you make it down to the city line you’re OK here. The Westchester County portion of the New England Thruway right on down through the Bronx on through the, uh, Bruckner Expressway are looking good right to the Triboro Bridge. For ...”

“... when it came to Gillray’s turn he made them all kneel reverentially and drink to Jacques-Louis David, a notorious republican, as the “first painter and patriot in Europe”.’ The anecdote is second-hand but entirely credible, and the question only occurs later: could he have meant it? No one was sure at the time. Draper Hill surmised that the meeting ...”

“... In 1987, David Cannadine concluded an essay on what he saw as the dark and doubtful state of British history with a call to ‘fashion a new version of the national past which can regain its place in our general national culture, and become once again an object of international interest’. A job application posted through the unusual medium of a scholarly journal? I doubt it, but it may be that this essay found its way onto a desk at Penguin Books, leading to Cannadine’s appointment, in 1988, as general editor of the new Penguin History of Britain ...”