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“... resemble an etching, which is true enough, though it resembles something else even more, as Colin Harrison says in his excellent handbook to Palmer: a carved ivory. The Valley Thick with Corn is one of the most beautiful expressions of what Palmer’s son once astutely noted in his father, ‘a certain sentiment of surpassing fruitfulness’, and its ...”

“... Jocelyn has known or worked with. There is music that has been specially composed, a poem by Tony Harrison, the theme of which is all the toasts he and Jocelyn have drunk together in all the various places where they have worked around the world. They’re due to set off on Monday on another epic journey, the script, based on the Prometheus legend, is about a ...”

“... bellow their way through “Land of Hope and Glory”’. By then, Ponsonby had been succeeded by John Drummond, who saw the Proms through its centenary season of 1994 and its 100th anniversary the following year. Drummond shared Ponsonby’s ‘distaste’ for the Last Night: he regretted that it perpetuated the ‘jingoistic isolationism’ of the Sargent ...”

“... torpedo beard is matched by his viciousness, especially towards ‘young persons’. Frederic Harrison, the pope of Positivism, sports a ‘great, square, white beard’ (every comma counts, in that description); he, too, likes nothing better, while taking tea with Dr Richard Garnett, Principal Librarian at the British Museum, than brutally to crush the ...”

“... official accounts and facts on the ground became impossible to ignore. In the New York Times Harrison Salisbury published a series of reports that revealed significant civilian casualties from the US bombing of North Vietnam, refuting the technocratic myth of the ‘surgical strike’. Hersh began an effort to extend and reinforce Salisbury’s reports ...”

“... excluded, is attested by many contemporary witnesses, among them foreign travellers. If William Harrison, from whose Description of England of 1587 much in this book is drawn, can be believed, one visiting Spaniard thought that the cottagers of England enjoyed a diet unparalleled in Spain or France – the equal of that of a monarch. A member of Philip’s ...”

“... a commodity squandered as I had never known it before. 22 May. Reading Frank Kermode’s review of John Haffenden’s life of Empson makes me regret a little that Empson was cut out of The History Boys. In the first version of the play Hector sings the praises of Sheffield where he had been taught by Empson, then recounts to the boys wanting to go to Cambridge ...”

“... Grit and Glamour of an Icon’. She has interviewed more than 250 people, starting with the late John Warner (Taylor’s penultimate husband, a Republican senator) and her book reads like an extended feature for Vanity Fair. We learn that Bob Dylan adored her in Raintree County and that David Lynch kissed her after the 1987 Oscars (she was a fan of Blue ...”

“... a Greek Cypriot restaurant owner who had anglicised his name – and his English wife, Lesley Harrison. Georgios (‘Yorg’ to the family but mispronounced as ‘Yog’ by Andrew Ridgeley, whose version stuck) was the youngest of three children, and the only boy. He was six months old when Lesley’s brother Colin overdosed on schizophrenia medication ...”

“... and where by the early 1920s both the poet laureate Robert Bridges and the future poet laureate John Masefield had established themselves in suburban comfort. Graves lived from 1919 to 1921 in Dingle Cottage at the bottom of Masefield’s garden. I walk my dog past the cottage quite often. It’s set down in a marshy hollow which has a faint air of primal ...”

“... forehead at the front, the flukes at the back – and even in the middle. Melville tells us that John D’Wolf, one of his uncles, was in charge of a ship raised clean out of the water by a whale slipping beneath it and then ‘setting up its back’. During his time on the Essex, Owen Chase had a similar experience in one of the ship’s boats, when a whale ...”

“... them of encouraging it. That year, under the leadership of the anti-Semitic former neo-Nazi John Tyndall, the Front launched a racist campaign aimed at schoolchildren called How to Spot a Red Teacher: ‘You can recognise them when they sneer at our White race and nation and everything that has made Britain great.’ In view of Ukip’s insistence that ...”

“... in a bitter final chapter, ‘has not honoured the pain of our people in its politics’. John Jeffrey, the current deputy minister of justice, told him in September 2017 that turning a blind eye to the murder of the Cradock Four and others such as the activist Steve (Bantu) Biko ‘was the price that had to be paid’. Partly for budgetary ...”

“... by levelling a tax on every financial transaction. It has been embraced by the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, and 11 European countries plan to introduce something like it, called the Financial Transaction Tax. Britain will not be one of those countries while the Conservatives are in charge. Shifting vast, destabilising amounts of money from place to ...”

“... for their root causes. He took out a subscription to New Internationalist. He read Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Greg Palast. ‘It slowly dawned on me,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be a hidden hand behind seemingly random, unconnected events. I came to this realisation myself, long before hearing of the term “conspiracy theory” or “new world ...”