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“... in pain. ‘White Americans know very little about pleasure because they are so afraid of pain,’ James Baldwin wrote, ‘but people dulled by pain can sing and dance till morning, and find no pleasure in it.’ Holiday’s bitter-sweetness – a cocktail of the rambunctious and the rueful – spoke to both sides of this conundrum. Although she was variously ...”

“... On 23 January 1894, Henry James entered in his notebook two stories told to him by Lady Gregory, whom he had met first in Rome 15 years earlier. She had given one of them to him, he wrote, as a plot, and ‘saw more in it than, I confess, I do myself’. ‘At any rate,’ he went on, ‘Lady G.’s story was that of an Irish squire who discovered his wife in an intrigue ...”

“... Command. Nigel Williams, born in 1948, belongs to a generation which grew up while ‘Bomber’ Harris and his boys were still busily winning the war on celluloid and in paperback. To Amos, however, Britain’s ‘just war’ is as morally ambivalent as every previous episode of his life. The concentration on 13 February 1945 as focal point is evidence of ...”

“... for the South Bank Show, ‘smiling, simpering, giggling, looking down at his nails’. Richard Harris at the Savoy in 1990, ‘playing pocket billiards’ through his tracksuit bottoms. Rafael Nadal in Rome in 2011, ‘lying on a massage table with his flies undone, affording me a good view of his Armani underpants – Armani being one of his many ...”

“... included Yeats, with whom, despite their antithetical temperaments, he did theatre business, Henry James, another unkindred spirit, Tolstoy another, Strindberg another, and, nearer home, Gilbert Murray and the lecherous, contentious and extremely able Wells). He worked heroically to keep the Court Theatre going, to overthrow the stage censorship, to educate ...”

“... radicals. Although he belonged to a different branch of Whiggery from the more francophile Charles James Fox, Pitt too was a Whig. He never described himself as anything else, and had championed parliamentary reform during the 1780s. At Horne Tooke’s treason trial, the reformer claimed that he was only repeating what Pitt himself had said a decade ...”

“... declared over in 1962. Goulding had to decide what the IRA’s next step would be. He looked to James Connolly for inspiration. Before he was shot by the British after the Easter Rising, Connolly had deplored the prospect of an independent Irish state that retained the social system of British capitalism, and ridiculed the notion of a struggle for national ...”

“... Cavendish Square, north of Oxford Street, but still retained a mansion of 50 rooms in St James’s Square, along with other properties. As a man of commerce he invested in everything from coal to oysters, from soap to slaving, none of which commended him to Old Money. The dukes of Richmond, descended from a royal mistress, notoriously reaped a ...”

“... even the worst. What kind of further improvement workers were looking for is considered by José Harris in the light of local inquiries for a survey commissioned by Beveridge and carried out by G.D.H. Cole in 1941-42. It seems that the man in the street’s hopes were less ambitious than the Beveridge Plan which followed: there is no evidence that ...”

“... and apart from the preparations for enlargement, it was becalmed. British governments, first under James Callaghan and even more so under Mrs Thatcher, showed hostility to movement except in solution of the budgetary problem. For Britain, membership of the Community remained a reluctant necessity, and any further surrender of sovereignty was viewed with ...”

“... the need for them, and since 1945 even minority governments have been exceptional. Only one, James Callaghan’s, was based on an agreement with another party, and the collapse of the Lib-Lab Pact brought the end of his administration. The present government is unique in being a peacetime coalition of two complete parties based on a negotiated ...”

“... the extreme cold in which he lost several toes and his feet turned black, while the goldsmith Harris blew his frostbitten nose with his fingers and found that he had tossed it into die fire; every day eight or nine men died. It is Knivet rather than Cavendish who tells how the sick were set ashore at Port Famine and there left to die in the snow and the ...”

“... at what was then Columbian University, now George Washington University in Washington DC. James Mooney, an ethnographer at the Smithsonian, had acquired dried buttons of the mescaline-containing peyote cactus in Oklahoma from the Comanche chief Quanah Parker. The first experimental subject, a 27-year-old chemist, stretched out on the bed in his ...”

“... the last to be born are, soberingly, Stephen Adrian Lawrence (1974-93, ‘murder victim’) and James Patrick Bulger (1990-93, ‘murder victim’). And so ends the 20th century. Turning from subjects to contributors, the roll-call is undeniably impressive; surely no other project could come near to matching the success of the ODNB in commanding the labour ...”

“... A hostile Congress, or fraudulent multiple slates of electors, or both, would put Kamala Harris in an impossible bind. One​ possible outcome of the next presidential election is that a Democratic candidate wins a dispute-proof victory and is straightforwardly inaugurated. Another – perfectly likely – is that Trump runs again and is ...”