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“... is he doing that, darling?’ or ‘Is that what people have in their kitchens now in Surrey?’ Part innocent, part anthropologist, he was thrilled by this brave new world but was never going to be seduced by it. Spitalfields in the mid-1980s was a shabby, little-known corner of London, dominated by the all-night fruit and veg market whose ...”

“... to indicate that the author is far too sophisticated to accept unreservedly that Dorking is in Surrey or that men really do oppress women. By what standard, then, is the literary work self-deceived? And why do postmodern writers make it so exasperatingly difficult to say that Tony Blair really did hoodwink the British public over Iraq? There is a form of ...”

“... a continuing record of high individual success: Tom, the pioneer in the discovery of photography; John the founder of the Royal Horticultural Society; and Josiah II, the head of a great family firm secure in the knowledge of its acknowledged fame and industrial leadership. All of these claimed achievements have something of a hollow ring when examined more ...”

“... on will-power. She had been reluctant to marry her husband, the statesman better known as Lord John Russell (or ‘Finality Jack’) than as the First Earl Russell, for he was 48 to her 25 when they married in 1841, and nobody supposed she ever loved the man to whom she dutifully bore four children. She did her duty – in Griffin’s nice phrase, ‘She ...”

“... of joining that porcine elite, its readers thrilling at what a mere £18 million might buy them in Surrey, Tuscany, Florida or the Côte d’Azur. But Country Life also likes to flatter its patrons with a notion of their better selves, as connoisseurs, collectors, lovers of theatre and occasional readers of books. Thus on 20 May this year it offered them a ...”

“... the society portraitist. Painted in 1786, it shows Polier at home with his friends Claude Martin, John Wombwell, the paymaster to the Company’s troops, and, in the background, with his head turned towards the viewer and painting another picture, Zoffany himself. Although Polier affects a long, drooping ‘Indian’ moustache and wears a turban, his ...”

“... that by all means in this country,’ Alderman Roberts of Grantham was moved to remark in 1946. As John Davis concluded in the Cambridge Urban History of Britain (2000), the second half of the 20th century saw local authorities reduced to ‘agents of the central welfare state, their incapacity off-set by central subsidies which covered over 60 per cent of ...”

“... circles the new guides, with their unmistakably foreign approach, got a mixed reception. John Summerson, reviewing them for the New Statesman, felt a need to bring his readers, and indeed himself, round to the idea. ‘Books on the English counties’ had, as he said, ‘come rather thick since the war’. The others, of varying quality, tended to be ...”

“... at the First Battle of Ypres. In July he was commissioned into the 3rd Battalion of the Royal West Surrey Regiment, and applied for an attachment to the RFC. The following month a medical board at Chatham confirmed his vision, hearing and blood pressure were normal, and he was in. Photographs show a handsome, confident 19-year-old with a centre parting and ...”

“... that men are sometimes wicked on purpose; Robert Kee, the hot-eyed public prosecutor … When John Birt arrived at the BBC as Deputy Director-General at the end of the 1980s, apocalyptic assessments of the programme were back in fashion. According to Birt, the BBC’s Chairman, Marmaduke Hussey, regarded Panorama as a microcosm of a BBC that was ‘out of ...”

“... Qabbala, or even claim to have inspected and made sense of the symbolism of the Revelations of St John of Patmos. Dukes was also sexually attracted to Stone – or Stone had been born yesterday if Dukes was not. Dukes had terribly vulnerable eyes which when they were hurt would fade over and grow misted with an affecting desolation. It takes a desperate man ...”

“... might have applied to her.On 23 April 1726, Mary Toft was at work in the fields near Godalming in Surrey with two female friends when a rabbit leaped up beside them. All three women were pregnant and probably hungry. They gave chase to the creature, hoping to catch it and cook it, but the rabbit got away – as did a second one. Months later, having ...”

“... summoned. His lofty earlier debates on the Agony in the Garden and Cain and Abel with his friend John Colet would have remained unknown – Colet was not one to rush into print – if Erasmus had not written them up and got them into circulation. If Colet’s new St Paul’s School was known abroad, it was Erasmus’s doing. Even Jean Vitrier, coming to ...”

“... lodged within the household – Latin familia. ‘That sweet enemy, France’ was how the Earl of Surrey described the Tudor relationship with the neighbours over the Channel: a mixture of recurrent political hostility and beguiling cultural dependence, as versions of French texts fuelled the English print market, and France’s humanist fashions in poetry ...”

“... which leads to the gruesome possibility of the Mitfords eventually being appreciated only in Surrey. Nevertheless, it is still funny that Nancy’s aesthete Oxford friends, invited home for the weekend, should be ‘shaken like rats’ by Lord Redesdale (the father), told they were ‘hogs’, ‘sewers’ and ‘damned puppies’ (‘I’d rather take a ...”