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“... and siege-engines (‘Walter Scott and Hollywood had it right’). Cavalrymen were dressed in iron at a time when iron had up to fifty times the value relative to what it has today, a ‘staggering investment’ indeed. The overall story is of a ‘dramatic reversal of the pattern of victimisation’. A West that had ...”

“... be pleased to give dinner to a British officer in captivity. My host, with one eye, one arm, the Iron Cross with oakleaves, talked in a strained voice of the epic experience of war. Were we British, he wanted to know, terrified by the roar of the nebelwerfer? We spoke in French, a German soldier waited on us, and we sat up, drinking brandy by candlelight. It ...”

“... has been tricked into believing Hero is unfaithful, Don Pedro asks: ‘Runs not this speech like iron through your blood?’ Iron has to be hot to melting-point before it ‘runs’, but cold steel can run you through. A sword is in the words, so too is a sudden rush of liquid heat brought about by anger and molten ...”

“... nearest bushes, possessed by ‘a single unmixed instinct of fear for his young and happy life’. Richard Holmes’s impressive and absorbing Firing Line shows how accurately Tolstoy projected, in this episode and others, the psychology of troops in battle. Holmes quotes Lieutenant David Tinker on his first experience, during the Falklands War, of being ...”

“... career (in his chapter on Marvell, Milton and Dryden) without reference to Lawrence Lipking or Richard Helgerson. The Forster-Dickens chapter makes no mention of the alternative line of Dickens biography that descends through Thomas Wright and Katherine Longley to our contemporaries Peter Ackroyd and Claire Tomalin. In his chapter on James Joyce Hamilton ...”

“... Yet Piano burst into public view with the Centre Pompidou (1971-77), which, designed with Richard Rogers, is the most celebrated of the high-tech megastructures of the period, and today he is also associated with large urban schemes, including the redevelopment of the old harbour in Genoa (1985-92) and Potsdamer Platz in Berlin (1992-2000), as well as ...”

“... Catholic doctrine, but from the austerity of Jesuit life, ‘the cold-water shaves and the single iron beds’ that Heaney knew at St Columb’s. Hopkins’s ‘whole theology of suffering’, his determined enunciations of self-denial, also echoed Heaney’s ‘mother’s situation … doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but ...”

“... beginning with the Nazi eugenics movement and ending with drunken cameras swinging from one iron door to another in an underground corridor of a Cologne laboratory, to burst finally onto a tray of pathetic gene-manipulated petunia seedlings – all to the accompaniment of eerie Stockhausen-like music. What other branch of learning or culture would allow ...”

“... to others and captured the collateral advantages of growth. The industrial frontier of which Richard Trainor writes, the Black Country, was a more complex affair. He has two noble families, the Earls of Dartmouth and Dudley, together with their respective towns, West Bromwich and Dudley. The Black Country was a supply area for the metal trades as well as ...”

“... for sixpence, ‘in a petty shop at Salisbury, where books, baccon, red-herrings and old iron, were exposed to sale’. Warton thinks that they are sharing the odd discoveries of fellow antiquarians. It is one of his likeable qualities that he does not see that Malone, dedicated to possessing the Bard, is never so whimsical. Another time, Warton is ...”

“... world and back again. Here, at the end, Mount is on the trail of one of the book’s heroes, Richard Jefferies, Victorian polymath, nature writer, campaigner against the exploitation of agricultural labourers, fantasist and (in Mount’s semi-serious conceit) a 19th-century avatar of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. One of Jefferies’s favourite ...”

“... workers as a pillar of sanity, even a larky soul: they never hear the tears hiss on the hot iron. Oddly, she can go into the garden and kill a cockerel without any parade of sensibility, and she has a ruthless way with live plaice and lobsters. More oddly, she can read with entire approval a report (in January 1941) that Hitler has painlessly gassed ...”

“... Boers, who feared that they might be used to prove the antiquity of the world. The naturalist Richard Owen, who worked in London at the centre of an imperial network, identified them as the remains of mammal-like reptiles that he called dicynodonts (from the two canine teeth that these animals used to break up their diet of plants). Pinpointing the ...”

“... air power could finally have achieved Britain’s inordinately delayed liberation from the iron grip of its myths. Woodward himself (or his co-author) pathetically testifies to the strength of those myths: after the suitably exciting opening chapter (‘The Day They Hit HMS Sheffield’), the recounting of the protagonist’s pre-Falklands naval career ...”

“... shrewd, supersubtle, shamanistic, Rasputin-like. I’m really rather proud of the man. His cast-iron effrontery is admirable, somehow. If I ever commission a private Mt Rushmore I’ll stipulate that his head be given plenty of space. Having so dauntlessly fulfilled the role in which Bellow has cast him, Ludwig has earned a kind of immortality. But even ...”