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“... its shuttered finish. This was painstaking: ‘Air bubbles which naturally cling to the rough wood texture needed to be knocked loose by vibrating the wet concrete mechanically after it was poured but before it set, but not too vigorously: over-vibrating concrete would shake the gravel to the bottom.’ He finds that even John Betjeman, the ...”

“... legs. A dressing table for my mother had bulky, rounded drawers, made of some kind of heavy yellow wood the colour of camel hide; she draped it in pink spotted tulle over a heavier satin underskirt, with braiding and a frill to define the kidney-shaped contour of the tabletop. It was a piece made by hand to look machine-tooled and modern; each of the drawers ...”

“... Birmingham City Council had already ordered an inquiry, to be headed by the education consultant Ian Kershaw. Gove nevertheless announced his own inquiry, bigger and certainly more inflammatory, as a result of his decision to select Clarke, a former head of counter-terrorism for the Metropolitan Police, to lead it. Clarke’s report was published just as ...”

“... strong, warm and macerated in phlegm. He had the genial, tannin glaze of a resting Stone: Ronnie Wood morphing into Bill Wyman. A heavy silver wedding ring. The ever-present mobile phone. I’d given Mr Nice a first reading. And that’s how Marks presented himself. How he charmed the uncharmable, the warders at Terre Haute Penitentiary: his ‘usual trick ...”

“... Tippett is refreshingly free of old prejudices and stale arguments. (The previous standard text, Ian Kemp’s Tippett: The Composer and His Music, was sketchy on biographical detail and appeared in 1984, when there were still ten years of Tippett’s creative life to come.) Soden admires the early music, but argues consistently that Tippett’s essence is ...”

“... the illegitimate daughter of the sculptor Jacob Epstein. The couple set up house in St John’s Wood, but Freud kept his old quarters at Delamere Terrace. According to one of his constant companions, ‘Lu would tell Kitty that [we] were going to work together when really [we] worked an hour or so then would “go down the West”.’ Freud did not take to ...”

“... for the London Magazine, then for Karl Miller at the New Statesman (and, eventually, the LRB). Ian Hamilton called her ‘Britain’s foremost literary shrew’. She was a strong, funny critic. She lost patience with Virginia Woolf’s novels (‘too devastatingly vague’) on discovering that ‘she thought you need a corkscrew to open a bottle of ...”

“... she told us in her poems, the short biography in her books and the shadowy figure described in Ian Hamilton’s biography of Lowell, which appeared in 1983. In that same year Denis Donoghue, in a new edition of his Connoisseurs of Chaos, wrote: Elizabeth Bishop was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, February 8, 1911. Her father died when she was eight ...”

“... honeysuckle along the back wall or hanging tasteful Indian friezes in a four-storeyed St John’s Wood mansion are the pursuits of reactionaries and manipulative control freaks. The cosmetic is opposed to the ethical. In Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, the only way for Rosie to convey her hatred for her ‘crude, vicious, racist and ignorant’ father – a former ...”

“... effused one settler, ‘has ever left me with the impression of being a “whiter” man.’ Ian Smith’s Selous Scouts sustained his legend. Tidrick, however, can show that this model Rugbcian lied in order to promote the cause of white settlement and empire. In 1889 he stated, with bald falsehood, in the London press, that the high plateau of ...”

“... indignant at the haemorrhage of jobs and skills, chart the progress of disindustrialisation. Ian Jack’s Before the Oil Ran Out and Robert Chesshyre’s The Return of a Native Reporter are fine examples: picking over the debris of the factory system, they find their pathos in the spectacle of ghost towns. And then there is the literature on ...”

“... on white-owned farms being washed away by the rain. He became fond of the country, then run by Ian Smith’s white minority government in defiance of the rest of the world, including its former colonial master, Britain, and considers Smith’s Rhodesia a great agricultural success story. By that time the war between black nationalist fighters seeking ...”

“... the flutter of opinion, bound to the steady metre of walks and excursions and friendships.MILLER: Ian Hamilton was against my saying so, but I feel there was something good there from time to time, in Spender. Like that poem about the aeroplane …HEANEY: ‘The Landscape Near an Aerodrome’.MILLER: That’s right.O’HAGAN: About the plane descending to the ...”

“... ratio at two to one, and make sure that native detachments developed no common identity. Charles Wood, secretary of state for India under Palmerston, made no bones about the objective: ‘I wish to have a different and rival spirit in different regiments, so that Sikh might fire into Hindoo, Goorkha into either, without any scruple in case of need.’ ‘As ...”

“... for the rest of the Civil War – indeed even through the rise of Leveller agitation in 1647? Ian Gentles has suggested that Presbyterian strength was based on a combination of the wealthier tradesmen and the poorest layers of porters, watermen and sailors, in which apprentices from the more substantial guilds acted as a shock-force, against an ...”