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“... traditions of give-and-take which still survived in the postwar Bethnal Green anthropologised by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in Family and Kinship in East London (1957). Davin’s respect for the resourcefulness, grit and loyalty of these working families is clear: the streets may have been mean but the locals weren’t. In all this the role of children ...”

“... of off-the-cuff comments in a popular radio programme, which, however distinguished the presenter (Michael Portillo), should have been checked with a more reliable source. Collingham’s opinion of British imperialism is that it was essentially ‘exploitative’, which may be generally fair, but sits oddly with her criticism of the preservation of ‘peasant ...”

“... knew that ‘superficial knowledge and flash’ were not enough when it came to her young lover Michael Bruce’s preparation for what she hoped would be a career in British politics. She excoriated travellers’ tales of the East that only scratched surfaces, including Lamartine’s celebrated Voyage en Orient (1835), the book that was largely responsible ...”

“... monograph on the history of the York Retreat, and the two volumes of essays edited by Bynum, Porter and Shepherd, pay eloquent testimony to the transformation effected in the history of psychiatry over the last twenty or thirty years. The works of Foucault, Erving Goffman, Thomas Szasz and R.D. Laing, and more recently the contributions of Andrew Scull ...”

“... point. It should be taken on board by every history teacher in the country, and of course by Michael Gove’s acolytes and others who want history to impart ‘patriotism’. But it’s not exactly Lawson’s. Lawson wants to target Britain as a nation just as wartime Germany has been targeted. He regards British colonialism as inherently genocidal, just ...”

“... In the same volume there is a fierce essay by Timothy Buck on the insufficiencies of Helen Lowe-Porter’s translations of Mann’s writing, and even of the recent versions of Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain by John Woods. The failings are apparently mostly lexical and syntactical: ‘Knopf have once again employed a translator whose knowledge of German ...”

“... the persecution of those with German names. ‘The fabric of our society is under threat.’ Henry Porter’s book was written in this climate. As its title promises, it is mostly about the lies that newspapers have told in the sample year of 1983-4. You read it with avidity, because the book is fluent and well-researched and appallingly funny, but afterwards ...”

“... and listened to the music. But in summer, spring and winter, the great building remained empty. A porter stood in front of the door like a stone statue, perfectly immobile. He aged visibly, his gold buttons grew dull, his black tailcoat acquired a greenish patina. Nothing more was heard of the fearless builder. The steam baths sent gay plumes of smoke into ...”

“... her official briefings. John Major once told her to leave because he found himself dropping off; Michael Howard used to ‘rock and lurch in his chair’ to try to keep awake; and Douglas Hurd’s technique was to ‘sink far down into his chair and hood his eyes so you could not tell whether he was awake or asleep.’ The inference Rimington draws from this ...”

“... the event has slipped British historical memory. I don’t imagine the topic will make it into Michael Gove’s ‘patriotic’ school history syllabus, and even at the time it was seen as something of an embarrassment. A war ‘undertaken against a nation so puerile in that art’, one military official wrote, ‘would better deserve the name of ...”

“... There are​ some wonderful rhymes in Cole Porter’s song ‘I get a kick out of you’: if-whiff-terrif, high-guy-sky with the first syllable of i-dea. And, even better:When I’m out on a quiet spreeFighting vainly the old ennuiAnd I suddenly turn and seeYour fabulous face.We wonder why ‘fighting vainly’ is subtly better than ‘vainly fighting’, we are pleasurably uncertain what ‘a quiet spree’ might look like, and ‘the old ennui’ impeccably captures a rather boastful world-weariness also known as the ‘mal du siècle’, whatever century you have in mind ...”

“... homes, and he improved. Thanks to the admirable efforts of Sydney J. Freeberg, now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard, Bobby returned there, on a graduate programme. But no good. There was a history of riding fast – on horses at the ranch, or on bikes in the city: Bobby died on 12 January 1965, after bashing into an Eighth Avenue bus on ...”

“... was no room for half measures. Compromise with an idol was a denial of God. In The Idolatrous Eye, Michael O’Connell tackles a more difficult question: why did the Puritans believe not just religious but all forms of theatre to be idolatrous? It’s not difficult to see why they disapproved of the great cycles of religious drama. Although the cycles were ...”

“... has another explanation, however. It was just a ‘taboo’, he writes (quoting the historian Michael Howard), like ‘intra-marital sex’. Everyone knew it went on, and was ‘quite content that it should, but to speak, write or ask questions about it’ was ‘regarded as extremely bad form’. But that was not so, certainly at the start, and in ...”

“... myself,’ she wrote in one of the essays in Slouching towards Bethlehem. Her subject was Comrade Michael Laski, who ran a splinter group of Stalinists in Los Angeles, where Didion interviewed him in 1967. He was threatened from every direction. Dealing with dread, Didion believed, invited risky measures of self-protection like alcohol, heroin, sex and ...”