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“... showed around twenty NF supporters, all men, giving Nazi salutes as they went into Southall Town Hall. Southall was one of the most racially diverse areas in London: in five wards surveyed in 1976, 46 per cent of the population had been born in the New Commonwealth. The National Front’s candidate, John Fairhurst, had ...”

“... mundane infrastructure becomes poetry. They aren’t as majestic as great masonry multi-spans like John Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge (with its demolition in the 1930s the Thames lost its finest crossing), or as Promethean in their ambitions as the great American suspension bridges, but the low curves of Maillart’s spans manage to look as if, for once, an ...”

“... Coleman went to Wellesley College and then married Loyd Ring Coleman. She gave birth to a son, John, in 1924, contracted puerperal fever, and was confined for two months as a mental patient in Rochester State Hospital. Recovered, she journeyed with her husband to Paris, where he worked in advertising. For a while Coleman wrote a society column for the ...”

“... though he brings these two things together. It’s not only that a packet of biscuits suggests John Buchan’s Hannay. The older tradition is acknowledged to the point of parody when the Prime Minister’s private secretary is given a family set of rooms in Albany where, ‘coming in off the chilly stone staircase, Maxim and Agnes had walked through a time ...”

“... seduce with a brief taste of old establishment opulence, are still in great demand. The medieval hall, the light flickering off oil paintings, the toasts to ‘Domus’ by Master Junior, all serve to reinforce the impression in the lucky diner that he is one of a people set apart. As I enter the courtroom (and bow), the stipendiary strides in from his ...”

“... sustaining meal’ enjoyed by Mole and Rat and Toad and Badger before setting out to reoccupy Toad Hall. The films? There was that caneton à la presse which looked good in Chabrol’s film about the man pursuing the motorist who has run over his son; and of course in Aimez-Vous les Femmes? an entire girl is served up, looking very dishy among slices of lemon ...”

“... different style. I’d never heard anything like it,’ Count Basie said. In time he employed her. John Hammond, the pioneering record producer who ‘discovered’ Holiday, said: she ‘changed my musical tastes and my music life’; she ‘sang like an improvising jazz genius’. ‘I don’t think I’m singing. I feel like I’m playing a horn. I try to ...”

“... administration. The LAPD may be incorruptible, but there is no question that some rooms in City Hall can be bought. Taking advantage of the furore provoked by the King tape, Bradley set up a commission into LA policing which drove Gates into resignation, effective July 1992. In his place, the Mayor appointed a young black Chief from Philadelphia, Willie ...”

“... time in the 1960s – when Christopher Logue and Adrian Mitchell have been asked to Hintlesham Hall in Suffolk to do a poetry reading. They ring the doorbell and a liveried footman tells them that they should go to the servants’ entrance. ‘I said, let’s leave. “No,” Adrian said. “We’ve come all this way. We’ll earn our money.” ’ They ...”

“... only conduct the symphony he had composed for the inaugural concert in the splendid new concert hall, he was also the architect who had designed the splendid new concert hall. On free afternoons he was a brain surgeon as well, or have I pinched that from later jokes? By page six of The Sieve of Time Leni Riefenstahl is a ...”

“... By 1963​ , John Cage had become an unlikely celebrity. Anyone who knew anything about music – who had perhaps followed the perplexed reviews in the New York Times – could tell you how he had managed to transform the piano into a one-man percussion ensemble by wedging nails, bolts and erasers between its strings; or how he had – ‘and you’re never gonna believe this’ – somehow composed silent music ...”

“... The interior, rarely photographed, is a mess of tacky ideas from the 1960s, reminiscent of a bingo hall in, say, Middlesbrough. Despite its name, opera cannot be performed in it; and the minor hall beside it, which can stage chamber operas, is painted close to black inside and needs only a glitter ball to suggest a suburban ...”

“... magic building called the Khan Mirjan. This is a 14th-century caravanserai or staging inn, a great hall with a gallery under improbably high pointed arches. We were served by a dancing waiter, designed by Toulouse-Lautrec: a bottle was balanced on his bald head, a tray was spinning on his thumb. The second-century arch at Ctesiphon is in the same high ...”

“... of the working classes in the second half of the 20th century: ‘the telly, the car, the bingo hall … eating fish and chips in Spain’. The laughter of the Cheltenham audience is tinged with shock that he should be quite so sneering. In the second lecture, discussing the unfortunate consequences of Eliot’s ‘Francophilia’ and referring to his essay ...”

“... to find a purer expression of the life transformed through education than his. At Albrighton Hall, his college of further education, Blunkett wanted to take O-levels, but the headmaster was ‘a caricature of the progressive educationist, believing that exams were not merely unnecessary but positively harmful, narrowing intellectual development’. He ...”