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“... 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 ...”

“... the Paris department store, under construction. With its bones on display, you can see how an iron frame met the demands of the building type: maximum open space and light. The store had to be conceived, in the words of its architect, Louis-Charles Boileau, not in terms of masses but of the space it envelops. In an illustration of the exterior of Grand ...”

“... fiction. What she dreamed of escaping to is hard to say. One of the problems faced by Richard Mabey in his biography of Thompson, Dreams of the Good Life, is that Lark Rise to Candleford and its sequel, Heatherley, which wasn’t published until 1979, are almost the only sources we have. By the time she came to write them, the intervening years ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... instructive sign of the times. When Churchill died in 1965, we thought we were burying the past. Richard Crossman, a reluctant mourner at the funeral, wrote afterwards: ‘It felt like the end of an epoch, possibly even the end of a nation.’ But what era feels more remote today than that of Wilson and Heath, the great modernisers for whom modernity failed ...”

“... or writing poetry or applying for life insurance, is an affair of the imagination. As a certain Richard Price explained in 1778, paper money must be thought of as the sign of a sign. If coin signified real value, paper, ‘owing its currency to opinion’, had ‘only a local and imaginary value’.* We have no choice but to re-imagine it daily. I looked ...”

“... for the revolutionary naturalism of his acting style, notably his startling performance as Richard III. Garrick was elected to the Club in 1773; the playwrights Oliver Goldsmith and George Colman were already members and Richard Brinsley Sheridan would be admitted a few years later. The Club wasn’t just full of ...”

“... more to those discussed here – as are the movies and documentaries, with Albert Finney following Richard Burton and Robert Hardy as a screen Churchill. As for approval ratings, in an admittedly contrived phone-poll BBC2 viewers last November voted him the greatest Briton of all time. Most Churchill biographies have been massive: Roy Jenkins’s weighed in at ...”

“... worn down by tolerance and inclusion. The titles of Hofmann’s first two volumes, Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983) and Acrimony (1986), lead us to expect harshness and harshness is what we get. Not only harshness, though. The child feels neglected, but he manages to study at Christminster, and he is formidably clever. ‘All around these dangerous ...”

“... of its owner’s private fancy, and each is scrupulously defended from adjacent gardens by an iron railing. The function of the dividing wall in ‘The Boatbuilder’s Yard, Cookham’ (1936) is duplicated by a fish-tank, jealously insulating its aquatic occupants from contact with the world outside their narrowly defined territory. For Spencer, such ...”

“... breakers, the gale ‘shouting and moaning then in anger and torment as we steadily pressed our iron into its ponderable body’.To return to the necessary choices: I thought Walter’s account of Anson’s squadron in the Le Maire Strait very fine – this was a true sea-man’s sea – and Cowper’s ‘Castaway’ (related to an incident in ...”

“... year so did Drury Lane – even though it had been rebuilt in 1794 to incorporate the first ever iron safety curtain. Both were replaced by much larger auditoriums, which had consequences for the repertoire. Covent Garden now had a capacity of 2800, excluding the boxes, and a stage that was eighty feet wide. Filling it was difficult and the subtle character ...”

“... good or even brilliant in terms of historiography) falls into three camps: the conservative right (Richard Pipes), neoliberal right (Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder) or the cravenly apolitical centre (Timothy Colton). They all treat Russia as a problem to be solved. What is the underlying reason, they ask, for Russia’s deviance from the ...”

“... When Richard Sorge was hanged in Sugamo prison in Tokyo, on 7 November 1944, I was still a student and I regret that I never had occasion to take a drink or three with that wit, charmer, womaniser, tosspot, home-wrecker, author, journalist and master Soviet agent. I had better luck with my friend Kim Philby, Sorge’s only serious rival (that we know of) for the title Spy of the Century ...”

“... oaks are greater menaces by far to our ancestral tree-covering than periodic clear felling. The iron-using industries, those favourite targets of writers through the years who have imagined they saw in woodland ‘removal’ irreversible devastation, were in reality quite blameless: they depended on a steady supply of underwood and it was very much in their ...”