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“... Thomas Grant’s​ Court Number One tells the stories of 11 prominent trials heard in Court One of the Old Bailey between 1907, when it opened, and 2003. His aim is to use these stories as illustrations of ‘British sensibilities and preoccupations over the last hundred years … Through the criminal trials … there can be traced at least one version of the history of social and moral change over the last century ...”

“... Cary Grant sits down at a table with Ralph Bellamy and Irene Dunne in 1937 and says: ‘So you two are going to get married.’ It is The Awful Truth. Grant sits down at a table with Bellamy and Rosalind Russell in 1940 and says again: ‘So you two are going to get married.’ It is His Girl Friday ...”

“... curiously, only 21 are included here) have been compared by Robert Nye to the poems written by Thomas Hardy after the death of his wife, and by Jonathan Raban to In Memoriam. The subject is a precarious one for poetry, and Dunn has not always succeeded in avoiding the pitfalls. Poems like ‘Dining’ and ‘Arrangements’ are dangerously direct; Dunn’s ...”

“... by seeing the play at Basingstoke’s Haymarket Theatre, which recently lost its Arts Council grant and has closed down. I remember very little about the production except that the actors were wearing heavy woollen costumes, which were no doubt suitable garb for an 11th-century Scottish castle but looked uncomfortably hot and itchy under the stage ...”

“... from the audience. The exchange was mediated by Ross Kemp, the ersatz hard man who used to play Grant Mitchell in EastEnders and is married to Rebekah Wade, the editor of the Sun. Kemp congratulated the heckler on having exercised her freedom of speech, then told her to get out. ‘And I thought I was hard,’ Campbell said. Someone asked if he was still ...”

“... plantation to be shared out between the dead man’s relatives.In 1834, Douglass’s new master, Thomas Auld, a mean ‘object of contempt’, believing his authority was being challenged by his insolent teenage slave, handed him over ‘to be broken’ by an overseer called Edward Covey. ‘Mr Covey succeeded in breaking me,’ Douglass wrote, ‘in ...”

“... stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes and design for an innovative production of Twelfth Night. Grant completed the commission, using fabrics from the Omega Workshop for the costumes, and went over to Paris the following ...”

“... His first idea was to attach the Warburg to the Victoria and Albert Museum, financed by a grant in aid, a proposal rejected by a senior civil servant at the Treasury, who pointed out that ‘if a grant in aid to the Warburg Institute were to be proposed to Parliament, it would be asked who or what is the ...”

“... hurry, its divided aims.’ It was a time when students were publicly funded and when the Treasury grant to universities was distributed by the University Grants Committee, largely made up of academics and working at arm’s length from the government; they understood what universities needed and they ruled with a light touch, distributing block grants and ...”

“... ashamed’ into the orbit of men.You could make a research appointment, I discovered, at UCL’s Grant Museum of Zoology, and the albatross would be taken out of the cabinet so you could see it up close. ‘As we are closed to the public in the morning,’ the curator told me, ‘you will have peace and quiet to draw the specimen.’ I began my ...”

“... It would be quite possible to read about Edward Thomas and wonder how it was that so many people made such allowances for him. A man who had a house built for himself and then refused to live in it, he tormented his wife and children with his restlessness – he calculated he was never happy for more than a quarter of an hour in the day ...”

“... the Psammead, or sand fairy, a creature that looks a bit like a monkey with eyes on stalks, can grant a wish a day and hates getting wet. In The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), the children discover a flying carpet that can take them anywhere in the world: its daily allowance is three wishes. The Phoenix, like the Psammead, is of an awkward but basically ...”

“... I’d depended on the History of ‘A’ Battery, 84th Army Brigade, RFA 1914-18 by Major D.F. Grant MC (1922). Unusually, the major had commanded the battery throughout, making him paterfamilias to his small group, at most three hundred men, among them my father. Lieut. R. Darley turns up in his pages quite a bit. Once, ingloriously, he unloads munitions ...”

“... de Briouze, Lord of Gower, and sentenced by him to hang as a rebel and a homicide. The saint was Thomas de Cantilupe, former bishop of Hereford, who had died in 1282. From soon after his death posthumous miracles had begun to be attributed to him, and he was officially canonised by Pope John XXII in 1320. The story, in outline, runs thus. On the morning of ...”

“... looking back from 1555. A student at Wittenberg, he becomes a follower of the radical theologian Thomas Müntzer after witnessing a dispute between Müntzer and Martin Luther; Luther Blissett is very much not on his namesake’s side. The narrator’s story begins a few years later, in medias res, at Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525, when Philip of Hesse’s ...”