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“... Baroness James, making a rare visitation to a blighted metropolitan zone, downriver of Tower Bridge, has written a very useful book, a book on which I will be happy to draw for years to come. That was back in 1972. Title? The Maul and the Pear Tree; co-authored by T.A. Critchley of the Police Department at the Home Office, where James then earned her crust as a Principal in the Criminal Policy Department ...”

“... might find itself cast by the Conservative leadership as a convenient surrogate for Brussels. James Meek Now​ the discussion turns to what England wants, which was bound to happen, whether the result had been ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. The focus on Scotland, not just in the last few weeks but (with occasional attention paid to Wales) the last few ...”

“... were born the modern – one might also say pre-Post-Modern – masters: Jack Goody (1919), Victor Turner (1920), Mary Douglas (1921), and Marshall Sahlins (1930). Right in the middle came Clifford Geertz, who was born in San Francisco in 1926. In the quarter-century between 1960, when he published his masterly The Religion of Java, and the middle Eighties, he ...”

“... to choose from. He could, for instance, have picked on the investigative journalist John Kenneth Turner, who travelled to Mexico in 1908 and discovered that Diaz’s wonderfully healthy economy was based on massive slavery and the slaughter of the Yaqui Indians. Turner wrote up his findings in a series of slashing articles ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”

“... 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new king, Charles II, and his brother, the future James II. In 1665, it was James’s eagerness to capture Dutch slave-trading forts on the West African coast that set off the second Anglo-Dutch war. In the last quarter of the century, English ships carried almost 300,000 ...”

“... the vicar of Wreay, some papers in the Carlisle Record Office and the diaries of Losh’s uncle, James. For the modern biographer it is slim pickings, and Uglow takes the only possible course, which is to build up the background and the context in the hope that they will describe an outline in the foreground, a space that will suggest what Losh was like and ...”

“... his gift for showmanship and his Paris education to make himself the prototype Victorian aesthete, James McNeill Whistler had started out as a dutiful son, following his father to West Point before turning his back on the Army to pursue the artist’s life in Paris. He arrived there in 1855, at the height of the craze for the vie de bohème, and like many ...”

“... Emperaire, or a Temptation of St Anthony – and thought about repeating them in the key of late Turner. But Delacroix was always the presiding genius. The Fall of the Rebel Angels in the show is a wild précis of Delacroix’s Apollo ceiling (with Brueghel in the background). Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise draws from the same source. The great ...”

“... cowardly dogs who fall down dead in their own Shit’, cried the infantrymen’s leader, James Wolfe, the future Martyr of Québec. Years later, Mason still feels bad about abandoning his village at this moment. He’s just one of those guys with a guilt-ridden nature. Unlike Dixon, who leaps in to beat up a passing Slave-Driver, without a thought as ...”

“... a man whose lovers include Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth, Marlene Dietrich, Tyrone Power, Robert Ryan and Cary Grant must have had some kind of good time, but no one gets to have much fun in Higham’s book. Higham explains with nice elaboration that, with women, Hughes ‘preferred intermammary ...”

“... part of English landscape painting in the work of Richard Wilson, Gainsborough, Constable and Turner, all of whom are represented. The value of this book to architectural historians is immense, since many of the houses illustrated have since been altered or rebuilt, or have altogether disappeared, like the famous Nonsuch Palace or Pontefract Castle. The ...”

“... to know something about the history of painting. Disappointingly, the English 19th century after Turner seemed to be beneath the girlfriend’s notice, and when we walked around the Russell-Cotes one vacation, I found myself beginning to feel uncomfortable with the derision she clearly felt for most of what was in the museum, however snide I had been about ...”

“... this novel without saying Venice, and yet the name is never said. The dust-jacket may give us a Turner water-colour of Venice’s waters, but the blurb says not one word about the novel, and the novel never says the word ‘Venice’. The scene is unmistakable, and is just the setting within which to make the mistake of your life. McEwan has said that ...”

“... such as Polygon and Canongate, writers like Alasdair Gray, Agnes Owens, Thomas Healy, Tom Leonard, James Kelman and Janice Galloway have found the city a congenial location for their life and work, and their success is encouraging others. Of course, Glasgow has always had its writers. Torrington’s late Sixties hero is himself a working-class would-be ...”