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“... a firm sense of their traditional rights. People knew that the governing class would take the very best things from a wreck, but that still left a share for the common coaster. A mouthful of raisins, with only a little gravel in your teeth.Legally speaking, the Golden Grape was not a true ‘wreck’. Medieval statutes, still in use in the 17th ...”

“... officials prevaricate or lie has trained him to make proper use of an investigative journalist’s best source: the leak.The list of known names of government employees who for moral and patriotic reasons have broken their duty of silence – and often their pledge under the Official Secrets Acts – is impressive. Some would call it a roll of honour. From ...”

“... journalists; there wouldn’t be a proprietor pulling the strings. I might have been less naive if Nicholas Garland’s story of the muddle-and-fudge launch of the daily Independent, in his book Not Many Dead, had then been available. I might have thought differently, too, if I’d known that the inspiration for that innovatory Review dummy had been Motorcycle ...”

“... He glances at some recent works in the canon: Robin Hardy’s rather unconvincing The Wicker Man, Nicholas Roeg’s dazzling Don’t look now, even William Friedkin’s grotesque gallimaufry The Exorcist – whose best section was surely its prologue, jangling the nerves with a loud, jumpy soundtrack broken by the sudden ...”

“... and low road to incomes policy in The Socialist Agenda.* Owen’s thoughts on incomes policy are best read in conjunction with theirs, just as his chapter on Equality is better read with Nicholas Bosanquet’s recent pamphlet, ‘Signposts for the Eighties’,† which points to the new challenge of inequality within the ...”

“... has suffered an alteration, and the architect of these Baroque edifices turns out to be one Nicholas Dyer – with a career as Wren’s protégé but a life-history significantly different from the real Hawksmoor’s. Here Superintendent Hawksmoor turns out to be a senior detective based on (new) New Scotland Yard, where his predecessor had worked from ...”

“... thirteen billion years ago in the range of wavelengths detectable by the human eye are now best seen in the infrared. (Crudely put, the light has been stretched into longer waves.) To make the observatory sensitive to this redshifted light, the hexagonal segments that make up JWST’s primary mirror are coated with a thin layer of gold, which is much ...”

“... wine trade at the British Library later that day. That older trade tends to be skated over. Nicholas Faith’s The Winemasters of Bordeaux (1978) begins, more or less, with Pepys’s visit to the Royal Oak Tavern on Lombard Street in 1663, where he encountered ‘a sort of French wine, called Ho Bryan, that hath a good and most particular taste that I ...”

“... his own carriage, half of which contained his bespoke darkroom. The Ministry of Transport did its best to accommodate the unusual traveller and his considerable baggage. He was, after all, a man of importance: Tsar Nicholas II had received him personally in 1909 and requested more of his striking colour images. But ...”

“... the elusively reforming political stance of its more famous companion piece. More muses about the best state of a commonwealth in one of his epigrams (it goes roughly: ‘do we want a king or a Senate? – hang on, if we have the power to answer this question then we must already be kings; and if we are not kings we’d better shut up and stay out of ...”

“... the stem – in some other ancillary tasks and in cigarette-making, not much in cigar-rolling. The best jobs went to whites: ‘Stringent requirements needed to be met to become a master cigar-maker, sorter or box-decorator, as entry into the cream of the cigar trades became restricted along race and craft lines, as much by the white workers as the ...”

“... as a place to work – ‘there was cheerful, productive anarchy; everyone did what they loved best,’ the composer and one-time producer, Alexander Goehr remembers – and as a medium for listening to. Peter Maxwell Davies recalls how, as a boy on a council estate in Swinton, he would listen ‘every evening, more or less from the moment it started till ...”

“... by Andersen Consulting that though the firm’s tender was higher than others, the best possible candidate to provide the computer system was (wait for it) Andersen Consulting. ‘It is clearly wrong,’ the MPs said, ‘for somebody who is tendering for National Health Service business also to be advising the National Health Service as their ...”

“... antagonist, Hugh MacDiarmid, puts in an appearance early on. MacDiarmid had been Finlay’s best man, but when Finlay published Glasgow Beasts, an’ a Burd in 1961 the pioneer of synthetic Scots was scandalised by its demotic Glaswegian, and went on the attack with a pamphlet, The Ugly Birds without Wings. His ire was unquenched four years ...”

“... their makers was manifest in the published results of a recent Time Out poll to choose the ‘100 Best Films’ and with them a ‘Best Director’, ‘Best Actress’ and ‘Best Actor’. (‘Best Female Star’ and ...”