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“... to finish. This was partly because of uncertainty, but it was also because much of the labour took place in the periods between mark-making. Often he would sit on one of the chairs arranged around the studio, making mistakes in his head so as to avoid making them in the work. He also spent a great deal of time in his studio reading Agatha Christie novels ...”

“... which are often bedlam. High-minded modernist ideas and aspirations may have driven Colin St John Wilson to design his building as he did, but it’s the unruliness of some who go there that makes it appealingly lived in. Study describes what goes on inside, obviously – except, and equally obviously, when it doesn’t – but in its outward aspects the ...”

“... every week. In his first season, 1960, D’Oliveira headed Sobers in the batting averages and took 70 wickets; the next season Sobers had the better batting average but D’Oliveira outscored him – and Sobers was the best all-round cricketer there has ever been. What is most touching, and awful, in Time to Declare – D’Oliveira tells it unwincingly ...”

“... now 92, for a quarter of a century, but that’s the occupational disease of her gender). I took my own mocks for the death examination on a January mountainside a few years ago by observing a little stroke, and I can confirm that hearing is the last sense to go before black-out. A certain self-distancing curiosity about medical, clerical, liturgical ...”

“... I first met Tony Crosland 25 years ago, at a seminar at Nuffield College. I took an instant dislike to him. I was then a rather priggish Bevanite, and I was shocked by his politics. I was even more shocked by his manner. He seemed to typify what I most disliked about the Southern English mandarinate. He had a cut-glass accent ...”

“... Russia to be the only country that could be relied on to resist Fascism. Most of us at that time took a rosy view of the USSR and had no awareness of the cruelties of Stalinism. We eagerly read the publications of Gollancz’s Left Book Club and felt guilty at not going out to fight on the Republican side in Spain. Shortly before the outbreak of the war I ...”

“... Alexandra crying, and the name stuck. Within a couple of years, Gully’s parents divorced. Dee took her to England, borrowed a house and wrote about ‘London life’ for the New York Times, until the Sunday Express hired her as its book reviewer. Gully’s father took her for holidays ‘in his snappy white Mercedes ...”

“... in which individuals actively traded on the stock market, owned portfolios of shares and took responsibility for their gains and losses. These shrewd, well-informed capitalists were intended to have a direct interest in the companies they invested in.Not surprisingly, this vision of financial citizenship proved unrealistic. Few people had the ...”

“... On the evening​ of 24 November 1848, Pope Pius IX fled from the city of Rome. At 5 p.m., he took off his Moroccan silk slippers with crosses embroidered on their uppers, put aside the red velvet papal cap and dressed himself in the black cassock and broad-brimmed hat of a country priest. Half an hour later, in a state of great agitation, he left the papal audience chamber in the Quirinale Palace by an internal stairway and tiptoed down to the courtyard, where a carriage was waiting for him ...”

“... was entering a large metal box, and another rack-full was emerging. Machinery firmly purred. It took eight minutes for the tubes to go through, he told them. Eight minutes of hard X-rays being about as much as an egg can stand. A few died, of the rest the least susceptible divided into two; most put out four buds; some eight; all were returned to the ...”

“... thrusting a slice at him and beaming. He has always loathed the stuff, but ‘in less time than it took to think the thought, I realised that she couldn’t help herself. She genuinely loved me ... but a short-circuit in her psyche prevented her from empathising, from making that step outside of her feelings into mine.’ He takes a big bite and feigns ...”

“... of his senior cabinet member is made on more than casual acquaintance. It is well-known that John F. Kennedy met Dean Rusk for the first time when he interviewed him for the job: Reagan and Haig had seen each other three times before the Election of 1980 but on only one of these occasions, shortly before Reagan’s nomination, had there been anything ...”

“... cotton plantations of the deep South, was sufficient to discourage thoughts of freedom. Douglass took the risk, but his first attempt failed, leading to his and his accomplices’ immediate arrest. That misfortune, however, was followed by a piece of astounding good luck. In a decision that is still difficult to fathom, instead of punishing him the ...”

“... interest of mine, especially the earliest traces of human settlement, which my excavations suggest took place 12,000 years ago or very soon afterwards. That’s nothing compared to the age of the bedrock of the island, much of which is Precambrian, dating to 1.8 billion years ago. For years I’ve walked across that bedrock with my mind fixed on the human ...”

“... of Ethics, a work that philosophers still mine, and the model for modern masterpieces such as John Rawls’s Theory of Justice and Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons. But Sidgwick was one of those terrifyingly hard-working Victorians whose day job was a small part of what they got through, and although his moral philosophy gets very adequate treatment ...”