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“... If you’re going to steal other people’s ideologies, steal big. By flinging fistfuls of cash at Ulster busmakers to produce empty space (the key difference between the Routemaster and other buses is that one corner is cut away to make an open-air platform at the back, enabling passengers – if they’re able-bodied and unencumbered by children ...”

“... British welfare state. Instead Renwick tops and tails his book with the well-known figure of Sir William Beveridge, opening with a vignette of the great social reformer going to the Commons on 16 February 1943 to listen to the debate on his plan for comprehensive social insurance, and closing on 5 July 1948, the ‘appointed day’ on which the Labour ...”

“... the Loch Ness monster being found are a bizarrely low 500 to 1. (Another 5000 to 1 bet offered by William Hill is that Barack Obama will play cricket for England. I’d advise against that punt.) Nonetheless, 5000 to 1 pales in comparison with the odds you would have got in 2008 on a future world in which Donald Trump was president, Theresa May was prime ...”

“... she is able to sustain our interest in their dramas, pleasures, quarrels and sorrows long after ‘William’ (as Barker always calls him – even, irritatingly, ‘our William’) has ceased to write wonderful poetry. In fact, she manages to make an intriguing sub-narrative out of his wife’s and his sister’s ...”

“... The painters have paid too much attention to the ism and not enough to the painting,’ William Carlos Williams wrote in 1928. Something similar could be said about Williams’s own critics: since his death in 1963, attention to his theories and to his life has been getting in the way of his poems. With Williams, more than the usual number of isms and caricatures need to be cleared away ...”

“... social yield – manors, farms, pictures and so on – and then leveraging them at Lloyd’s for cash would have seemed to Bates foolish, which it is; but to treat this highly speculative investment as if it were gilt-edged, as if it were ‘the sweet simplicity of the 3 per cents’, is beyond foolish. But I guess the English were always gamblers. The third ...”

“... little foreign imports and works of art like the Lamborghini. It was not so unrealistic. Sir William Lyons founded the Jaguar car company on such a dream in the Thirties and the dream survived both World War Two and the increasingly sporty performance of the staid family saloon. Hard-nosed American dealers were prepared to pay $25,000 for a DeLorean ...”

“... At the more virile end of the spectrum were the little-known poets Alexander Rodger and William Thom. In ‘Whisperings for the Unwashed’, Thom is vigorously political, while the radical Rodger opens his satire on savings banks with this: Ho! ye worthless, thriftless trash; Worthless, because ye haenae ...”

“... hopelessly sidetracked by self-doubt and drink, has come to the village to write a novel about William Blake: ‘He read over the last few pages on the screen, making deletions and additions and willing himself into the story. He stood up and sat back down. He set his jaw and willed himself submerged. It was hopeless. It was like deciding to commit suicide ...”

“... intrepid sorts went to Dubrovnik and stayed in designated hotels, but that was all. So my father, William Woods, decided we should go. He was struggling to finish his novel Manuela (later made into a film, with Trevor Howard in the lead), and we were very short of cash. I suspect that he was also being pressed by several ...”

“... output of two generations of Heaton Coopers is dealt with, Alfred (d.1929) and the much reproduced William (d.1995). There is no mention of Julian, whose very large paintings of reft and ice-armoured mountain faces are masterly images of the Earth’s crust. On climbing, which Ruskin girned at for treating the hills ‘as soaped poles in a bear ...”

“... with such a sum unassisted. But there is, apparently, every likelihood that the HLF – rolling in cash – will pitch in. According to newspaper reports, Murray is prepared to lower the price (to £33.2m) for their purchaser of first choice. According to the same reports, the HLF is likely, at least, to offer a ‘challenge’ 50 per cent, if the rest can be ...”

“... the immediate success of the Yellow Book, and of his story in its pages, James told his brother William: ‘I hate too much the horrid aspect and company of the whole publication’ (this didn’t stop him from contributing three more pieces to the magazine).The Yellow Book was a short-lived venture, folding in 1897 after thirteen quarterly issues, but it ...”

“... on the move. In Egypt the Sultan of Turkey, sensing a coolness between them, made Clayton a cash offer for his red-headed wife; later, an American millionaire proposed to pay off all Clayton’s debts as the price of taking her off his hands. Plots ready-made for fiction abounded. Elinor, having twice been told by Frenchmen that she was a tigresse, was ...”

“... attractively collectable format as a celebration of Hay’s native place – Tarbert, Loch Fyne. William McIlvanney, an accomplished novelist, is another Scottish writer who has a strong sense of where he comes from. He wants to reveal in his poems ‘the streets outside where Scotland really lives’. Unfortunately, though, McIlvanney can’t spot a ...”