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“... in mid-20th-century Britain and the extent to which the empire had featured in them. Catherine Hall opened Civilising Subjects (2002) by describing her Baptist upbringing in Leeds. Missionaries and African students often passed through the home: ‘The sense of a Baptist family stretching across the globe was always part of domestic life.’ In an appendix ...”

“... in an antique shop before going round the much larger antique centre in Philip Webb’s parish hall. 6 January. Papers full of Charles Kennedy being, or having been, an alcoholic. I’d have thought Churchill came close and Asquith, too, and when it comes to politics it’s hardly a disabling disease. Except to the ...”

“... extending in an arc from Bethnal Green via Spitalfields to Whitechapel, famous in its day for such do-badding criminals as Jack the Ripper, and for such do-gooding enterprises as Toynbee Hall. More precisely, White’s volume recovers the fabric of Jewish life among those immigrants who ...”

“... he succeeds. At a Zendo in the Catskills: About the fifth day there, something happened that I’d only read of or experienced on LSD. I was sitting there meditating, and everything all of a sudden just emptied out. I was only an outline. Just an outline, like a Matisse drawing. Self-awareness comes rushing back, however, and Gray is none the ...”

“... in Weimar survived his departure. In 1901 he persuaded the grand duke to hire Henry van de Velde, the Belgian Jugendstil painter, architect and designer, to advise local craftsmen. Six years later van de Velde became head of a new arts and crafts school which would be reborn after the First World War as the ...”

“... conglomerates have had to let it go. The Oxford University Press feel no obligation to keep David Gascoyne’s Collected Poems in print. Faber and Faber get along very nicely on Tom Eliot’s singing and dancing pussy-cats. The Cambridge Festival (don’t tell them) is nowhere, it isn’t happening. What’s the story? Even the participants don’t ...”

“... the bottleneck – or gave up and went to get a drink in one of the galleries off the octagonal hall at the centre of the building. The explanation was Hockney himself; he was in one of the first rooms, and the thrill of being in the same place as the artist evidently made it hard for people to move on. It would have been odd had Hockney not been the centre ...”

“... asking the questions), he becomes impatient, irritated, as he explains yet again – if you’d only bloody listen – why Britain is a sick society and what measures should be taken to improve it. Some, clearly, have been listening. On 16 July, I joined an ‘emergency march’ against austerity and racism that I’d ...”

“... grasp is the planned murder of approximately six million helpless human beings (pace Singer, we do not know how many: that is part of the problem), which was not ‘a mind-numbing statistic’, but a monstrous crime. Singer’s approach does, however, make clear the fragility of cultural memory, and the heavy price of cultural forgetting. He looks at ...”

“... an international best-seller. Not that constancy was a conspicuous feature of his career. Joseph Hall, ‘our English Seneca’, remarked that Lipsius was as constant as a chameleon. This mattered, for the true Stoic wishes to be judged by his life as much as by his writing. Stoic philosophy is a guide to conduct, and the philosopher, the man best-equipped ...”

“... of his ballets and an exhibition devoted to his life on the fifth floor of the Festival Hall. His two best books have been reprinted in paperback: First Childhood, the first part of his autobiography, and Far from the Madding War, the best novel written about the Second World War, at any rate in Oxford. This last contains that inspired ...”

“... jet plane curtsying in its skirts of noise’ is a random example; ‘the concert hall with its lamps trembling in triumph like the train-ferry when it puts in’; blue wind-flowers that ‘shoot up out of the brown rustle of last year in overlooked places where one’s gaze never pauses’; or ‘It’s spring 1827. Beethoven/hoists his death ...”

“... all Moshfegh’s novels, is a mystery, as well as a portrait of a broken mind. But it’s also a hall of mirrors in which every image or event might be real, or a warped reflection of the real, or a reflection of a reflection of the real; and all of it may or may not refer, however obliquely, to the world outside the novel, a world in which its author is an ...”

“... in the grate and a smelly tallow candle to hold back the night. Thomas Rowlandson, ‘Vaux-Hall’ (c.1784). For the price of a ticket, one could enjoy musical performances and refreshments al fresco, or simply see and be seen. Princes rubbed shoulders with prostitutes, duchesses with doctors’ daughters: the social mix was a large part of the ...”

“... and lawyers – sought the status that a concierge, electric lights, a lift and a marble-lined hall could bring. In Theodor Fontane’s The Poggenpuhl Family, old Prussian nobility sit in a cramped, damp flat overlooking a cemetery counting out each pfennig. In Hugues’s street, behind the turreted façades, the spacious flats had seven, eight, even ten ...”