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“... work done by scholars in recent decades: Richard Bulliet on the economic importance of the camel, Andrew Watson on the role of the Arabs as introducers of new crops, Oleg Grabar on the Dome of the Rock, and so on. It is, however, a tribute to both the scope and depth of Lewis’s research in the past half-century that so much of the material he draws on is ...”

“... centre of our school lives includes commissioning ‘the distinguished historian and biographer Andrew Roberts … to chair a panel of academics who will draw up a simple but clear list of key facts, personalities and dates which every child should be taught’. I wonder, disingenuously perhaps, if one of those ‘key personalities’ will be William ...”

“... ideas propagated by figures like Martha Sherwood, who wrote for children, and the clergyman Andrew Boyd, drove new standards of modesty, morality and taste. The poor ‘herd together night and day, eating, drinking, sleeping in common’, the philanthropist Ellen Barlee wrote in 1860, in homes ‘unworthy of the name’. By contrast, the middle-class ...”

“... rather memorably, wandering the hills, ‘each irradiating each’. He also knew John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle and Benjamin Jowett, the master of Balliol, who – Taylor said, again memorably – was ‘nervous and still, deeply learned, a silent reservoir with a gleam’. Taylor’s daughter Una later wrote Guests and Memories: Annals of a Seaside ...”

“... crime and legal practice. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to present jury history as a whole is Thomas Andrew Green’s Verdict according to Conscience. The book is subtitled ‘Perspectives on the English Criminal Trial Jury, 1200-1800’. It sets out briskly and well in difficult Medieval terrain, begins to falter in the 17th century, and collapses ...”

“... writer’s style without losing the grain. A few weeks ago, we were discussing the poetry of Dylan Thomas. ‘Which of the poems do you like?’ he asked.‘The one about the fields.’‘“Do Not Go Gently Into Those Good Fields”?’‘Very funny.’‘Which one, then?’‘The one about the farm.’‘“Fern Hill,”’ he said. ‘Will you read it to ...”

“... masts went as high as that. The four-arch bridge across the River Irvine was built by a certain Thomas Brown in 1750, for the price of £350. Ten years before, the Royal Burgh’s sunken wells, dank and rotten, had been replaced by the Council. Pump wells were installed, and fresh water was all the rage. The second half of the 18th century, in a small ...”

“... person yet,’ he said. ‘It will be the book you can write now.’ He wanted his book to be like Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. I noticed he tended to eat pretty much with his hands. People in magazine articles say he doesn’t eat, but he had three helpings of lasagne that night and he ate both the baked potato and the jam pudding with his hands. He turned ...”

“... the prints are grouped by the authors of the paintings on which they are based, the room – and Andrew Wilton’s excellent essay on this aspect of the show – invites us to focus on the printmakers, especially the French Protestant immigrant François Vivares, and the brilliant William Woollett, who became the finest, the most intricate and industrious ...”

“... important sequences were found in the Karoo Basin of Southern Africa. In the mid-19th century, Andrew Bain, a Scottish road engineer, organised a huge network of collectors at the Cape, who sent vertebrate fossils back to London – some of them were as large as rhinos, others mouse-sized. Many of the specimens were in poor condition, and some had been ...”

“... became orthodoxy for men like Dod, Cleaver, Bradshaw. Hildersham, Baynes, Sibbes, Preston. Thomas Hooker and Ames. Dr Kendall sums up: ‘we are saved by grace, we are assured by works. Other writers above have implied this: Sibbes says it.’ Assurance is ‘a reward of exact walking’. Men should ‘labour to be such as God may love us’. This is ...”

“... texts, and the effect is of a kind of memory or haunting: of a book remembering its origins. Thomas Nashe imagined his printed pages being used to wrap expensive slippers (‘velvet pantofles’), ‘so they be not … mangy at the toes, like an ape about the mouth’. As Leah Price showed recently in How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, we ...”

“... of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind.’ Who said this? Jeremy Corbyn? Thomas Piketty? In fact it was Nick Hanauer, an American entrepreneur and multibillionaire, who in a TED talk in 2014 confessed to living a life that the rest of us ‘can’t even imagine’. Hanauer doesn’t believe he’s particularly talented or unusually ...”

“... submission of law. Of the many, often hyperbolic, appreciations of Kentridge’s style cited by Thomas Grant, two seem to me to hit the mark. The future Justice Edwin Cameron, watching Kentridge’s defence in the trial of the dean of Johannesburg under the Terrorism Act, witnessed a cross-examination that was ‘meticulously detailed, but ...”

“... preachin,’ she said. North Carolina was the birthplace of Billy Graham and three US presidents, Andrew Johnson, James Polk and Andrew Jackson, and also, among the twinkling lights out there, you could find the uncelebrated birthplace of Thomas Wolfe, the North Carolinian who wrote Look ...”