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“... is opening avenues into the past which until recently were unimaginable. Twenty-five years ago Rebecca Cann and her colleagues published a seminal paper in Nature that analysed the diversity of mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) among living people around the world. MtDNA is the component of our DNA that is passed on from the mother alone and has an especially high ...”

“... London, struggling at times to keep her end up in the conversation. ‘Am asked what I think of [Rebecca West’s] Harriet Hume’, the Provincial Lady notes in November, ‘but am unable to say, as I have not read it. Have a depressed feeling that this is going to be another case of Orlando about which was perfectly able to talk most intelligently until I ...”

“... of space to dream and wonder and imagine and – let’s face it – make stuff up. As Rosemary Hill points out in her wonderful book on Stonehenge, archaeologists sometimes claim ownership of the past, but the truth is that it belongs to all of us – and, as the case of Stonehenge shows, archaeologists are capable of doing plenty of damage. (In the case ...”

“... the worst:expect the best:andtake what comes‘Not a Hannah Arendt quote! :/’ Samantha Rose Hill, then the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Centre at Bard College in New York State, tweeted back, across the hours and the Atlantic Ocean. ‘I know! ’Twas sweet gift,’ Stonebridge replied, then added: ‘We should make our own.’‘One ...”

“... people, in the charged atmosphere of the postwar months, seemed untroubled that he would hang. Rebecca West, reporting the trial for the New Yorker, was surprised at the equanimity with which the jury sent him to the gallows: they came back from considering their verdict ‘as if they had been out for a cup of tea’. At the start of the war, BBC radio was ...”

“... Richardson, wanting to keep her books in print, agreed to the edition, although she knew Dimple Hill, advertised as the final chapter-volume of Pilgrimage, was no such thing. The ensuing confusion and critical indifference were disheartening. Even though she worked intermittently during the last two decades of her life on March Moonlight, which she regarded ...”

“... the scene Her purest of crystal and brightest of green; ’Twas not her soft magic of streamlet or hill, Oh! no – it was something more exquisite still. ’Twas that friends, the belov’d of my bosom, were near, Who made every dear scene of enchantment more dear, And who felt how the best charms of nature improve, When we see them reflected in looks that ...”

“... by the A-listed Alfred Hitchcock, by then responsible for huge and glossy Hollywood hits like Rebecca, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest. He was at the end of his contract with Universal, who were either not taken with the subject or disappointed by Hitchcock’s projected style for the film, so he produced it with his own company, Shamley, and ...”

“... and Tide, her journalism published everywhere, exciting new friendships with Margaret Rhondda, Rebecca West, E.M. Delafield, Stella Benson and Storm Jameson and all the other attributes that Phyllis Bentley had found so desirable, including Bentley herself. Active, outspoken, energetic, her tall figure slightly stooped but her glance just as eager, rushing ...”

“... sight of it. It doesn’t quite match R.’s experience when a heron mobbed by crows near Primrose Hill missed him by inches, but as with any evidence of urban rurality, I find it cheering. It confirms, too, my detestation of gulls, which I would happily see hounded out of cities and back to their proper stamping ground. 28 July. I’m just finishing the ...”

“... a cup of tea in the parish room, with the door open onto a field of sheep and in the distance the hill behind Feizor.I collect the paper from the village shop where, seeing a headline about yesterday’s lightning strikes in London, a woman says: ‘I love it when they have it nasty down south.’This is the real North-South divide, which HS2 will do nothing ...”

“... which would weaken the purchase of both the Blairite Third Way and Cameron’s bloodless Notting Hill Toryism.The chief priorities of Corbyn’s Labour Party were neatly captured in two speeches made by John McDonnell, his shadow chancellor and often the project’s most eloquent spokesman. In 2016 he declared that Labour members would ‘no longer have to ...”

“... a version of Branagh’s own Protestant family in 1969. Buddy, the Branagh figure, played by Jude Hill, lives with his older brother and hard-pressed mother (Catríona Balfe), while his father (Jamie Dornan) comes and goes: he works as a joiner in England. A British soldier quips that he hopes Pa isn’t a joiner in one of the new armed groups: there was a ...”

“... Christopher Gray. Years later I learned that Gray had rubbed shoulders with McLaren in a Notting Hill group called King Mob, a unofficial affiliate to the Situationist International. Some say it was Gray who first suggested what a wheeze it would be to create ‘a totally unpleasant pop group’.Under cover of night, my brothers and I crept around town ...”

“... wading through a pool of water in a blue dress. Another was of Hania, aged two, rolling down a hill of daisies by Ladbroke Grove.In the 15th century, ‘tower’ was another way of naming heaven. But Rania always felt Grenfell Tower was too tall. They were at the top and you could see the Hammersmith and City trains coming in and out of Latimer Road ...”