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“... had long been curious about this very famous man. Collections such as the one made by Richard Marsh and Tambimuttu for his 60th birthday in 1948 contained much pleasant anecdote, and there were respectful reminiscences in Allen Tate’s memorial volume of 1966. Meanwhile, off the page, there was some gossip about such matters as a putatively vast ...”

“... to be the only guest and tries to stave off depression with the help of Herbert Tompkins’s Marsh-Country Rambles (1904). From this source, he learns that Maldon’s first Congregational Chapel had been built in the late 17th century by a ‘pugnacious evangelist and hot-gospeller’ called Joseph Billio, said to have been the inspiration of the phrase ...”

“... of a completely submerged van. In Bishops Cleeve, almost all roads were impassable. In Moreton-in-Marsh, manhole covers popped up like the lids on Smartie tubes and sewage gushed out. In Tewkesbury, the small Cotswold rivers smashed up against roads and bridges. Following the lines of least resistance they and then the rising Avon and Severn encircled the ...”

“... well as others owned by men of wealth and influence – but not the hundred-acre farms of men like James Roth, whose best land was bisected and paved over. The same outlook shaded into distaste for the people his projects were supposed to serve. As Frances Perkins said, ‘He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just the public. It’s a great ...”

“... forces, training and reserve battalions: the Lee Enfield (‘Lee’ is just a coincidence – James Paris Lee was the rifle’s designer). This multiple-round, bolt-action rifle, accurate to 600 metres, was the most famous product of the Enfield Lock factory, the brand leader. In the First World War it was known as the ‘soldier’s friend’. The ...”

“... gluttony has its origins in Abraham Darby’s successful use of coke for iron smelting in 1709, James Watt’s invention of the external-condenser steam engine in 1765, and the sinking of the first oil well by Elmer Drake at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859 – all of them, we might note, English-speaking businessmen. The three significant fossil fuels ...”

“... but the first inkling I had that he’d been an actor was when Alec Guinness had him down to Steep Marsh for a weekend. I’d no notion that, as recounted in the obituary, Sam had had a late flowering and that in his nineties he had figured in one of the Harry Potter films. The obituary written by Nicholas de Jongh.14 July. I am reading as a bedside book The ...”

“... Group complained that the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) had sequestered portions of East Marsh, a year ahead of their promise, to construct ‘a huge 12-lane motorway’. The ODA admitted that two trenches had indeed been dug, for ‘archaeological’ research, animal bones and beer cans photographed and preserved; along, presumably, with the rubble ...”

“... challenged in the courts in the case of Venables and Thompson, the boys who, both aged ten, killed James Bulger and were sentenced to HMP. In that case, the trial judge recommended a tariff of eight years. The Lord Chief Justice raised it to ten. Michael Howard decided it should be 15. According to figures analysed by the pressure group Justice, juveniles and ...”

“... it’s terracotta). 15 September. Discover a good bookshop, Crockatt and Powell on Lower Marsh, a street opposite The Cut near the Old Vic, where I buy Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master’. It’s a short story in which Henry St George, a famous novelist, supposedly Daudet but resembling ...”

“... in Walmer Road while Tilbury and PC Dave Pullan went to another temporary relief centre, Clement James in Treadgold Street. ‘Because we were in uniform,’ Rumble said, ‘we were seen as authority figures, but people wouldn’t have perceived us as having anything to do with the council. But we are council. I was inside the cordon and my team were there ...”