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“... it runs north into Baffin Bay. In 1585, on returning from his first voyage to find the passage, John Davis wrote to Francis Walsingham that ‘the northwest passage is a matter nothing doubtful.’ Thirty years later, William Baffin wrote to one of his financial backers that ‘there is no passage nor hope of passage.’ Baffin did see a lot of whales ...”

“... At one end there was an open kitchen, looking out on the garden at eye-level, and here Hetta would cook delicious dinners and William his horrible soup. The main body of the room was dominated by a large rectangular table which was the communal ‘hearth’ and served for everything. Hetta presided at the top end, nearest the kitchen, and William had his ...”

“... great boeuf en daube of To the Lighthouse embodies the texture of the life of a bourgeois family: cook has been two days making it; Mrs Ramsay presides over it; but it is tiresome Mr Ramsay, sulky and self-important at the top of the table, for whom everything has been done, and little he cares. In A Room of One’s Own a Cambridge college invites the author ...”

“... after the last four years’; ‘Heavens, what a vale of tears it is’; ‘Oh heavens, now John Ashbery and I have to go and have an “intimate” lunch with Ivar Ivask.’) In 1973 she wrote to James Merrill: ‘I could weep myself to think of Mr [Chester] Kallman’s weeping over “The Moose”.’ There is no explanation as to how she learned that ...”

“... tell me.26 January. We are comfortably ensconced in our Weekend First seats at King’s Cross when John Bercow comes along the platform. Not quite the elegant, slightly flamboyant figure one sees in the Commons, he’s in a scruffy suede jacket and, according to the trolley attendant, sitting in standard class, where he is happy to have a conversation about ...”

“... please approve the following payments for my number one military contact which are paid via Thomas Cook. Your email okaying them is all the paperwork necessary. The stories are: Recruit speared by drill sergeant – £3000 Drunken Sandhurst instructor sacked – £1000 Woman squaddie killed in Iraq – £500 ‘Of course,’ Brooks had replied. Edis told ...”

“... Cantley, whose outrageously biased speech (in favour of the defence) was satirised by Peter Cook in the character of Justice Cocklecarrot. In the 1980s, Carman took on a series of high-profile criminal cases. He successfully defended Dr Leonard Arthur, who had been charged with murder when he deliberately left a Down’s syndrome child to starve to ...”

“... Neville and Witter Bynner, two chunks of raw material, anxious to tell the world about their cook. George Neville went to school with D.H. Lawrence and supposed himself the ‘original’ of George Saxton in The White Peacock: in his memoir he congratulates himself upon his useful contribution to Lawrence’s conception of true manliness. Witter Bynner ...”

“... he supported him generously through Oxford and paid his considerable debts. Furthermore, although John Nichols, a womanising Edwardian dandy, was the antithesis of his homosexual son, they didn’t get on too badly. John was even proud of Beverley’s early achievements and advised him sensibly on those initially amateur ...”

“... auditors below stairs sitting saucer-eyed and murmuring ‘Go on,’ and ‘Well I never,’ while cook or butler relate one marvel after another about life up top. The only danger is that we might choke – like Philip Larkin turning the pages of the young lady’s photograph album – on such nutritious images. Towards the end Alan Pryce-Jones chooses a more ...”

“... of the action at the Heights takes place there, and Heathcliff as a kind of diabolical man-woman-cook who touches no food is more closely identified with it than with the moors, or with his machinations against the Earnshaw family, or even with Catherine. The real secret of Wuthering Heights may be its fierce and compelling fantasy and metamorphosis of the ...”

“... Bench spokesmen, there is some kind of scrutiny of government performance – as, for example, John Prescott has recently shown in transport, and Robin Cook in health. When both Front Benches are agreed on central issues, meaningful debate is difficult, bordering on the unachievable. Worse still, it may be difficult to ...”

“... and sought to bring a private suit for criminal libel, appeared to have it on the ropes; how John Wells felt that his jokes were ‘ostentatiously removed, spat on and ground into the carpet’ after brainstorming sessions with the others; how, as time went on, Ingrams loved to wind up his colleagues in the office, push his chair back and look on at the ...”

“... is a founding text of contemporary cookbook-writing, or Fergus Henderson, whose St John restaurants trained many of London’s newish wave of serious chefs – and to his and Gill’s generation of restaurant critics, the transgressive has become familiar. He’s not unaware of this, of course, and so, for the first time in his career, tries to ...”

“... schoolboy could be the next prime minister doesn’t cross either of our minds. On the other hand, John Birt is suitably impressed when I tell him that I actually met the great Lord Reith on the day of his extraordinary speech in the House of Lords likening commercial broadcasting to the Black Death. It was as if I’d said to the present Chief of the Defence ...”