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“... working alone from dawn till dark. When he was overcome with choke-damp at the start of work one day, he was hauled up unconscious – and resumed after a day or two once water had been thrown down the shaft ‘to absorb the gas’ and a bundle of brushwood had been dropped on a rope ‘to carry down pure air and stir up ...”

“... in the back row of the chorus. Though food is pretty basic, I find meals the high points of each day, just as they are when filming. One talks about food, thinks about it, and tonight, returning from the opera, we are mortified to find we are too late for supper. Anne Vaughan, our organiser, braves the kitchen and eventually a waitress takes pity on us and ...”

“... On a hot​ day in August 1806, Jean-Honoré Fragonard stepped into a café near the Champs de Mars to eat an ice cream, collapsed, and died later that day of ‘cerebral congestion’. He was 74 and by this time virtually unknown – a few lines in the daily papers were the only acknowledgment of his death ...”

“... and boy, but especially by those of us who have survived fifty-odd years of life in Britain. Our day-school years in the Thirties were much influenced by the public school system, expressed in schoolmasters’ aspirations and schoolboys’ comics. Simon Raven’s notorious devotion to that system began when he was only a seven-year-old comic reader, as he ...”

“... seven days, and in addition 1,297 were fatally injured. These figures mean that: Every working day more than five persons were killed. Every five hours the clock round a life was lost. Every 215,000 tons of coal raised was stained with the crimson of one man’s blood. Every working day 850 men and boys were ...”

“... apart, he to the prison of marriage to May and she to the dingy smallness of Europe. In modern-day New York, they could set up house together in Brooklyn, and no one would bat an eyelid. Newland could delete May’s number from his phone and unfollow her on Twitter. He and Ellen could pick up groceries together without worrying what anyone thought. They ...”

“... for young players.23 February. I love jokes and used to be fed them almost on a weekly basis by Barry Cryer, as one of his extensive and distinguished clientele that included Judi Dench and Andrew Marr. He would ring up and without bothering to say who it was would embark on the joke. When he’d finished he’d say, ‘Well, I’ll give you back your ...”

“... been recruited to the causes of nuclear disarmament, ‘blacks, women and the common people’. Barry Reay, one of the contributors, has convinced himself that Laurence Clarkson, the Ranter turned Muggletonian, was ‘an ordinary person’ who represented ‘popular thought’, although apparently ‘ordinary’ does not mean the same as ...”

“... compartments’ and in the early Sixties Brook realised that, far from being the truth-seeker’s day job, ‘the theatre was becoming a practical field in which the possibility existed of observing laws and structures parallel to those found in traditional teaching.’ This book charts the consequences: the Theatre of Cruelty work at the RSC leading to the ...”

“... figure, to put it mildly, and it is good to have credit given to his wife, who did most of the day-to-day administration of his digs. But, as Daniel’s account of his activities in India shows, it is really not true that he never undertook another dig after her death in 1936. This occasional snideness apart, the one ...”

“... to celebrate completion of the original OED in Goldsmiths’ Hall on 6 June 1928. This was Derby Day, which allows Winchester to describe the social scene and to opine: ‘A great horse race on a sunny afternoon tends always to bring out the best in people’ (at least it brings them out in their best). The occasion had its own aptness, for the Delegates of ...”

“... but a good deal more cold-eyed than anything one would expect to find in the work of Sebastian Barry. Like Jack Ferris, the drunken protagonist of A Goat’s Song, Ireland binged for a few euphoric years, then woke up with an almighty hangover. The champions of progress have accordingly been forced to confront the uglier aspects of modernity. Meanwhile, as ...”

“... than 48 hours and audiences hailed the second performance as a triumph. On one particular ‘mad day’ in 1773 (Figaro’s full title is, fittingly, La Folle Journée, ou le mariage de Figaro), he was chased across Paris by a sword-wielding duke whose mistress he had seduced. The same evening, despite having just barely avoided an aristocratic ...”

“... based on 13th-century market crosses, and lavishly coated with Puginesque fantasy. It won the day, and by so doing assured both the Prince’s reputation in death and the architect’s in life. But Scott certainly worked hard for his laurels, caught as he was between a bereaved monarch able and anxious to interfere, and the dozen-odd artists, responsible ...”

“... the first place. Bolton, an unreconstructed Cold Warrior, once canvassed for the arch-conservative Barry Goldwater and interned in the Nixon White House. He made his career talking up threats from Iran, North Korea and Venezuela to fill the void left by the Soviet Union. He has consistently urged US policymakers to take the hardest possible line, up to and ...”