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“... not to mention (though often forgotten) songs of hope and faith expressed in religious terms. Nicholas Dawidoff’s richly descriptive account of country music, built around well-researched biographies of its practitioners, shows how varied the form was, from the start, in theme, style and instrumentation. There never has been one kind of country music ...”

“... with the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Glenelg, and the Colonial Under-Secretary James Stephen (Virginia Woolf’s grandfather), with his Clapham Sect faith in the brotherhood of man. In the words of the historian Manning Clark, Stephen had come to the conclusion that ‘convicts and their descendants were ...”

“... blur of his mufti. ‘Are you filming?’ he said. ‘Filming what?’ said the cameraman, James Nicholas. The priest said: ‘Please don’t show this family.’ James reached along the stock of the camera and flicked a switch. Trimming what you film has become second nature in the province. Camera crews do not favour the faces of RUC officers; the cabbies ...”

“... exception that proves the rule. ‘It was that I had no gift. I had no natural talent,’ he tells Stephen Schiff in a recent New Yorker profile. ‘I had to learn it. Having to learn it, I became my own man.’ And, in A Way in the World: ‘I had had to learn to write from scratch, almost in the way a man has to learn to walk and use his body again after a ...”

“... at which it can manageably be renounced altogether. For example, when, near the end of the novel, Stephen Latimer declares that he has fallen in love, genuinely and for real, Miss Morrow’s response is ‘Oh, I see.’ Barbara Pym continues: ‘Miss Morrow had difficulty in keeping her disappointment out of her voice. She had somehow expected something less ...”

“... under Deng Xiaoping. The Senderistas own no allies, hold dialogue with no one. According to Nicholas Shakespeare, they accept no funds from abroad and their weapons of choice are stolen guns and hand-made beer-can bombs hurled from slings made of llama hair. Theirs will be one revolution without the AK-47. The elusive and wholly intransigent character ...”

“... the coexistence in Elizabethan court politics of essential harmony and potential rivalry. Nicholas Hilliard’s portrait of Robert Dudley (1576) The limitations on Elizabethan governance were not different from those faced by many governments in other times and places. The queen’s advisers sought plausible, easy and cheap solutions to complex and ...”

“... in the press, though it had already sent itself up in its inaugural programme, How to Listen, by Stephen Potter and Joyce Grenfell – the first of many satires, including Henry Reed’s high-camp Hilda Tablet comedies and Third Division, the comedy show that turned into the Goons. But mostly the press response was respectful. The social and political ...”

“... on the walls was a large picture, exquisitely painted by Spagnoletto,’ of the martyrdom of St Stephen. The Spanish school evoked the rack, the rapier, the ruff, the spiral ebony chair-leg and the fainting nun, and a world that was now sufficiently distant or in decline (in The Antiquary it is the invasion of Bonaparte, not the Jacobites, for which beacons ...”

“... to know. He had met Denis Thatcher and Mark at an arms fair. He had several times come across Stephen Tipping, Mark’s ambitious and thrusting partner in the defence business. No establishment door was shut to him. Naturally, James was very right-wing. He’d been a disciple, he still boasts, of George Kennedy Young, an MI6 agent who became deputy ...”

“... buildings there. Houston’s Pevsner, and my main means of imaginative entry to the city, is Stephen Fox, a professor at both the large and unlovely University of Houston, where I am teaching, and the élite Rice University, which has a beautiful campus laid out by the Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram just before the Great War; Cram’s original ...”

“... Writing​ to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free lollipop, sellotaped to the magazine’s cover. Like many of his plans from this period it came to nothing. In any case, sugar and spice weren’t really Finlay’s thing ...”

“... could expose Mason to comparison, not only with two serious recent biographies, of Wordsworth by Stephen Gill and of Coleridge by Richard Holmes, but with Susan Eilenberg’s persuasive book-length treatment of this very subject. Mason underplays the psychological interest of Wordsworth’s unceremonious takeover of the second edition, and (surely) its ...”

“... not being a person, could not be a fit person of full age. One of the judges, Sir James Fitz-james Stephen, applied the same reasoning that had been used in relation to the franchise: because women had never been able to hold public office, clearer language than this would be needed to change things. (It was the same judge who not long afterwards and without a ...”

“... something that still requires a good deal of work. This would begin with Bloom’s pursuit of Stephen as a form of cruising – why else does he follow him? – with all his thoughts about women merely decoys, and would involve seeing Stephen as one of those loud, smelly, overeducated gay boys with bad teeth who were ...”