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“... Bible into Chinese. (‘He boned up feverishly on Manchu,’ enthuses his other biographer, David Williams, in his schoolboyish way.) Borrow had to argue in Russian with the Tsar’s board of censors, hire and supervise ill-educated Estonian compositors to set up Mongolian print (which, he said, ‘differs little from the Mandchou’) and prepare ...”

“... writing is recognisably clean, clear and colloquial, only occasionally falling into what David Hare calls ‘the Esperanto patter of the higher mysticism’. From the start, Brook avoids ‘personal relationships, indiscretions, indulgences, excesses, names of close friends, private angers, family adventures or debts of gratitude’, though there is ...”

“... researched study) before the achievement of a controversial or intriguing statement about it. Mr Williams’s book is completely popular in its approach: with no index, no footnotes, no reading-list, masses of colloquialisms, and eye-catching, tendentious judgments at every turn. One reason for the difference is no doubt that, while it is technically true ...”

“... and callous murder’ of Hilda Murrell, to use the words of Chief Detective Superintendent David Cole, are complex. So complex that, I am told, the Police have taken some forty thousand or more records, of which over fourteen thousand have been computerised. The death of the 78-year-old Shrewsbury rose-grower is, I understand, the subject of the ...”

“... opening pages of Conceiving God: The Cognitive Origin and Evolution of Religion, the archaeologist David Lewis-Williams examines the earliest records of symbolic behaviour. It is unlikely we will ever pinpoint just when the human habit of investing objects with significance took hold. But for the moment, until fresh ...”

“... of the manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the mould of contemporary politics, we would create a new radical centre, push the Labour Party into third place, change the ...”

“... The information on Barclays came from a book published in 1944: Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams. ‘In 1756,’ Williams wrote, ‘there were 84 Quakers listed as members of the Company of Merchants Trading to Africa, among them the Barclay and Baring families.’ He had drawn, in turn, on a dissertation titled ...”

“... in the history of British socialism – into a kind of icon, ‘In The Future of Socialism,’ David Lipsey writes in the first substantial essay in the book, ‘Crosland had erected a towering castle. The rest of his life was devoted to defending it against all comers.’ There is an element of truth in that, but to the extent that it is true it points to ...”

“... it was painted in Spanish Town, the colony’s capital; and that it showed a man called Francis Williams, about whom Long had written a whole chapter in his celebrated History of Jamaica (1774). Not only that, he says, but when Long was writing that chapter, he had this painting in front of him and was describing it. The dealer, Jack Spink, is delighted to ...”

“... Mark Peel organises his serviceable authorised biography of Shirley Williams around an ostensible conundrum. Why didn’t Williams achieve more politically? Why did the polarising, hectoring Margaret Thatcher, rather than the consensus-seeking, appealing Williams, become Britain’s first woman prime minister? This is a common question ...”

“... Many people would say – there stands English comedy,’ David Frost is reported to have declaimed, as Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams stood side by side on his doorstep. Williams was unimpressed. ‘I thought to myself, “Then many people would be lacking in perception,” but shouted drunken goodbyes and reeled down the street into a taxi ...”

“... builders of Chernobyl? For the Kariba North Bank power station, however, there is now a memorial-David Morrell’s Indictment. Mr Morrell is the chairman of Mitchell Construction, the original contractors for the KNB project, and his book breaks ground unturned since Samuel Smiles’s Lives of the Engineers. In his pages, Mitchell Construction, in legal ...”

“... have run down’. The surprise is that instead of lecturing on Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Gertrude Stein and Marianne Moore, all of whom he acknowledges as ‘major influences’, he discusses an eclectic group of 19th and 20th-century poets who for the most part have endured long periods of neglect: John ...”

“... There is a poignant moment in the recent New Left Books volume of interviews with Raymond Williams* when he is congratulated on the ‘combativity’ of his writings. Poignant because the neologism, however barbarous, answers to a real scarcity: the scarcity, in our cultural repertoire, of sustained polemical address: Not that our literary pages don’t witness occasional outbreaks of revenger’s tragedy ...”

“... in an eternity of vain research along endless shelves.’ Jump forward seventy years, and for David Lodge’s Pooteresque Adam Appleby, the BM is a cosy, quintessentially safe asylum. Adam’s working life there is a matter of daily comforting rituals, as when he cools his research-fevered brow on the downstairs men’s lavatory cistern. The BM shelters ...”