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“... were, in art and life, part of Capa’s style. Whelan demythologises Capa without being sour. John Hersey wrote that ‘despite all his inventions and postures Capa has somewhere at his centre a reality. This is his talent’ – and described that talent as you might an actor’s or a gambler’s. Perhaps the wars he covered encouraged that kind of ...”

“... produced similar collections of the writings of Thomas Paine and his contemporaries in the 1790s, John Thelwall, Robert Owen and the British Utopians, and the responsibility for producing a Chartist canon could not have fallen into better hands. Few scholars can match Claeys’s ability to render 19th-century radicalism and socialism coherent by locating ...”

“... last years. The best-known part of Kelley’s story concerns his long partnership with the magus John Dee. It begins with his arrival at Dr Dee’s house, in the Thameside village of Mortlake, near London, in early March 1582. Dee, then in his mid-fifties, was the Queen’s chief consultant on all matters occult. He was renowned as a ...”

“... on Coward, one he willingly acknowledged. His discovery of the stories came in 1915 via Eva Astley Cooper (‘a kind of Ottoline Morrell of the Midlands’), in whose undistinguished Victorian mansion, Hambleton Hall, he was recuperating from TB. At Hambleton there were house parties to which Mrs Cooper invited noted ...”

“... grand reopening, two of its former bosses filed conflicting accounts of its recent history. Both John Tooley (1970-88) and Jeremy Isaacs (1988-97) describe the House’s considerable achievements over the past half-century; and Isaacs’s part in pushing through the magnificent rebuilding was heroic. What we still want to know is why things also went so ...”

“... that the Houses of Parliament were burned down not by revolutionaries but by bureaucrats. In 1834, John Phipps, an assistant surveyor for London in the Office of Woods and Forests, was tasked with finding more office space in the cluttered Exchequer buildings at Westminster. He discovered that a whole suite of rooms was being used for the storage of old ...”

“... a poem by Kingsley Amis, Four Quartets, Brideshead Revisited, Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Cooper, Angus Wilson, Horizon, architectural Modernism and the Festival of Britain. Just as you think something important is going to be left out it turns up: the bourgeois intellectual love-affair with France, the nascent aspirations towards internationalism in ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... and very satisfactory’, one of the chief pleasures being ‘getting back into male society’. John Cornford fought in Spain as a zealous young Communist, but his letters to Margot Heinemann reflect the same first-term-in-a-new-school excitement, the same all-male exhilaration. ‘I did quite well that day,’ he said of his success in rescuing a gun from ...”

“... thousand people. The disaster, all the preachers said, was God’s punishment for sinfulness. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, saw it as divine vengeance for the cruelties of the Portuguese Inquisition. He had identified a minor earthquake near a racecourse in Yorkshire as another such intervention: God ‘purposely chose such a place, where there ...”

“... commissioning work for radio from avant-garde figures like Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Giles Cooper. Equally ominous, News and Current Affairs in both Sound and Television built dynamic new empires, which attracted formidable young talents, took broadcasting boldly into politics, and used Features techniques when it suited them. The urgency and public ...”

“... There is often a vacancy to his acting, which can give the illusion of mystery. The producer John Foreman recalled that Newman’s second wife, Joanne Woodward, once said to him: ‘If you think he’s thinking something, he’s not always thinking something.’In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Newman hardly moves his eyes when he speaks – only his mouth. We ...”

“... play in the World Cup. In the evening, to a Waterstone’s gala dinner. The first speaker is Henry Cooper. He says something relevant, apropos Mike Tyson: ‘when someone goes arahnd bitin’ people’s ears off and punchin’ refs, that only tells me one fing: ‘e doesn’t want to be in the ring.’ Precisely. Cooper’s ...”

“... nature which caused her, in 1915, to attempt the rescue of the latest female recruit, Irene Cooper Willis, by introducing her to Bertrand Russell. Ottoline decided Irene could be more usefully employed in providing Russell with children, but Irene, while happy to act as his research assistant, preferred not to stand between Russell and Ottoline at a ...”

“... had become essential to the modern electoral campaign. Everyone remembers the young and handsome John F. Kennedy’s triumph in televised debates with his rival Richard Nixon. According to legend, Nixon lost the 1960 election by his refusal to put on makeup before the broadcast. One of the more subtly interesting moments in Mad Men occurs when we see an ...”