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“... at the time of the 2015 election. This is the outcome which has been argued for by the Tory MP John Stevenson, who is Scottish, but represents a constituency in the north of England. ‘You can’t have a situation where the government of the United Kingdom is determined by the representation from Scotland, which could then have significant influence ...”

“... sex or ability, they came and went when they chose, working-class mothers were admirably assisted. John Pounds, a crippled Portsmouth cobbler, ran one such, carrying on his trade while his pupils did the work he set them. A visitor suggested that he needed some new books – ‘those under that birdcage seem to be coming to pieces.’ Pounds: ‘So much the ...”

“... Ian Bell protests his disqualifications as a biographer rather too much: ‘I have approached Stevenson in the most unscholarly way. I am a journalist, and do not pretend to be anything else.’ But Bell, as he is at pains to point out, is a Scottish journalist and it is through the privilege of shared race and place of origin that he claims a blood-intimacy denied scholars ...”

“... bargain? Well, early in 1913, when Lloyd George was the chancellor making the proposal, Frances Stevenson, the daughter of a Scottish accountant and his part-French, part-Italian wife, did so. I can see why. It isn’t just that I’ve always had a soft spot for Lloyd George, who was a flesh and blood human being, and not one of those conscience-laden ...”

“... John Singer Sargent’s ‘Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife’ (1885). The first return to Treasure Island was made by Robert Louis Stevenson himself. Fourteen years after the novel was published, Longman’s Magazine published ‘The Persons of the Tale’, in which Captain Smollett and Long John Silver step out of the narrative after the 32nd chapter to have a chat ‘in an open place not far from the story ...”

“... to the current condition of the financial industry, Other People’s Money, published in 2015, John Kay talks about the state of the UK banking sector, whose assets then were about £7 trillion, four times the aggregate income of everyone in the country. But the assets of British banks ‘mostly consist of claims on other banks. Their liabilities are ...”

“... Robert​ Louis Stevenson was always ill, that’s what people said, and in the late summer of 1884 he decided he wouldn’t return to the South of France, where he’d spent the past year and a half in a house called La Solitude. His wife, Fanny, sought the advice of his London doctors, who recommended Davos in the Swiss mountains as being cholera-free, but Stevenson fancied southern England ...”

“... The daughter of Samuel Holland, a prosperous Cheshire farmer and land agent, the wife of William Stevenson, a scholar and writer of some reputation, and the mother of Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the most celebrated Victorian novelists, Elizabeth Stevenson has vanished. No portrait survives, no letter or scrap of journal, no cherished family anecdotes, no remembered trace of her character or opinions ...”

“... nightly feast in August as the military tattoo concludes its parade. In his boyhood, Robert Louis Stevenson would sometimes be surprised while walking in the New Town to ‘see a perspective of a mile or more of falling street, and beyond that woods and villas, and a blue arm of sea, and the hills upon the further side’. I stopped at the corner of Howe ...”

“... shipwreck, showmanship, early death – also bring to mind the life and career of Robert Louis Stevenson, another Scottish writer who looked at human adventure as a brand of metaphysics. Nowadays, people with a heart for proper adventure (or ‘extreme sports’) like to load themselves with equipment and dive into the ocean looking for wrecks, and it is ...”

“... Soho. Closer inspection reveals a Metro sign across the street, surely the clincher. But no: John Davenport, writing in Lilliput 17 years later, claimed he knew the joint concerned. ‘If you know Hastings really well you may recognise it.’ Hastings or wherever (‘Burra-Burra Land’ Davenport called it), Burra created here one of his finest greed ...”

“... uncanny faculty of melting’ had become a meltdown. Plath’s doctor during her final months, Dr John Horder, wrote afterwards: My judgment has always been that this was a very determined attempt to end her life ... I believe ... she was liable to large swings of mood, but so excessive that a doctor inevitably thinks in terms of brain chemistry. This does ...”

“... of characters, events and incidental detail. Less ambitious, but more subversive, Christopher Stevenson and Hugh Nissenson seek to dismantle the system from within by producing novels which look like something else altogether: a form of experimentation which often has rather puritanical motives behind it – the assumption being either that existing ...”

“... as Norman Stone, Hew Strachan, Annette Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau. With Cataclysm, David Stevenson draws on much recent work to provide a comprehensive account of the war, with a welcome interest both in the non-European theatres and in the home fronts. His book is also part of a more general attempt to rethink the meaning of the Great War and ...”

“... and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely realistic: it is full of information, for instance, about sailing in the Chesapeake ...”