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“... They began by suspecting we should make our fortunes by selling their children as slaves.’ Any constable trying to arrest a Shipham man was likely to be thrown into one of the pits. Still, these ‘lawless’ people had ‘a worthy curate’ whom they respected, though they didn’t agree with him, and in one of the villages a poor farmer’s daughter had ...”

“... night is evoked with much detail, and walk-on cameos by ascertainably ‘real’ 1990 guests – John Major, Richard Rogers, Neil Kinnock and, of course, the richly despised Howard Jacobson. Francis Jay gives an impromptu television interview in which, with all the authority of one who has studied deconstruction at Sussex, he dismisses the shortlisted ...”

“... transcended party politics. Of course there were exceptions. No Tory MP joined Stuart Holland and John Fraser in their criticism of the Police in Brixton, and no Labour MP supported Winston Churchill’s call for an end to immigration. Between these poles, however, there was agreement that the British Police should not arm themselves like the French CRS, that ...”

“... During the General Strike he ‘protected’ the offices of the TUC newspaper as a special constable. His next step – joining an electrical firm as a trainee rather than soldiering on at college – seems to have been the wisest thing he ever did. Here, moving from department to department, he developed theories about the nature of skills, and ...”

“... show buildings that are still quite recognisable today; pictures of the ‘Cromwell curve’, with John Fowler’s concrete bridge of 1867-9, are evidence of the scale of engineering work now masked by later building and softened by vegetation. The railways have proved adequate. Reading the plans of the St Mary Abbots Hospital, on the other hand, shows how ...”

“... fascination with how the past conceived its own past. How did 1930s sensibilities, from John Betjeman to Cecil Beaton, engage with Georgian and Victorian architecture? What of the interwar flirtation with the Baroque, spoken for by Sacheverell Sitwell, or the period’s notions of Neolithic Britain? (Massingham, a long-out-of-print ...”

“... of a mass of detail, as if the sheer weight of her protestations would convince the world that John, as she calls him, was not guilty. It doesn’t work, even though one agrees that the coroner’s verdict naming Lucan as the murderer was unfairly reached, and it must have been a heartbreaking task. Marnham’s book is more reflective and very much ...”

“... good luck in having a rich Crusader uncle in Sir Robert Malory, prior of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem, who led an English contingent against the Turks, 1435-8; but also his bad luck in having Uncle Robert die in 1440, before his nephew could profit from any nepotism. Personal injury, coupled with feelings of political impotence, might have ...”

“... led to several investigations into an alleged shoot to kill policy, the most notable headed by John Stalker, then deputy chief constable of Manchester. Stalker’s inquiry was continually obstructed by elements within the RUC and he was eventually, and very controversially, dismissed from the police. The findings of his ...”

“... hall. Spalding observes, justly, that by insisting on the intervention of the American architect John Russell Pope in 1929 the sponsor, Lord Duveen of Millbank, was promoting, against the inclinations of British curators and civil servants, the ‘latest American style’, the style of the new sculpture gallery in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Pope ...”

“... for the security forces. Would they at last teach the cheeky croppies from Derry a lesson? Had not John Taylor, Northern Ireland’s Home Affairs Minister, declared, after the shooting of Cusack and Beattie: ‘I feel that it may be necessary to shoot even more in the forthcoming months’? Had not the newly-formed extremist Democratic Unionist Party announced ...”

“... master of ceremonies, unwilling or unable to prevent himself interrupting the proceedings. As John Bayley put it a few years back, one primary object of a Barnes novel ‘is to dazzle and bemuse the reader throughout with the knowledge and reminder that this is a very clever young person writing a very clever and witty novel’. The most obvious ...”

“... bullied at school, and as a child was a disappointment to his extrovert and sports-loving father, John. Yet his father was to say later that if the family had ever got into straits, it would have been Peter who’d have helped them out, not Mick or Carl, because Peter really cared. John Sutcliffe had married his fiancée ...”

“... Hall, which opened in 1612, was an imposing three-storey house standing at the bottom end of St John’s Street, not far from Smithfield market. When it was built the street had to be rerouted around it, which did not please the residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving ...”

“... with their secretaries. I imagined there were sub-species of adultery going on, up and down John Dalton Street, Cross Street, Corn Exchange, but we never did matrimonial, or if we did the clerks locked the files away from me, so my most recent take on male duplicity came from the novels of Thomas Hardy. The 1960s were behind us, the era of free ...”