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“... week. 15 April. I have given all my literary archive to the Bodleian Library and this afternoon Richard Ovenden, the keeper of special collections, comes round to load up the hundred or so box files and take them to Oxford. There will be more in due course, including all my notebooks and the annotated copies of the printed stuff, but I’m very happy to see ...”

“... from 1959-64, when Douglas-Home lost; from 1992-97, when Major lost; and from 2005-2010, when Brown lost. But here we see the obvious flaws of this kind of analysis. Not only is the sample very small, it is clearly skewed. Prime ministers who cling on until the very end of their term, in the hope that something will turn up, are obviously in deep trouble ...”

“... in fact, there may be a shortage of embarrassment all round. This is the face of Austin painted by Richard Linklater, director of chatty warm-weather existentialist movies such as Slacker and Dazed and Confused. A short walk from my old home is a café-bar called the Spider House, a hang-out for students, ex-students and the professionally unemployed. It’s ...”

“... Richard SennettA few years ago, Michel Foucault and I discovered we were interested in the same problem, in very different periods of history. The problem is why sexuality has become so important to people as a definition of themselves. Sex is as basic as eating or sleeping, to be sure, but it is treated in modern society as something more ...”

“... of the well-born.’ Those epigrammatic generalisations, from the pens of Paul Veyne and Peter Brown, are fairly typical of the History of Private Life at its best: a book which makes the reader think, teasing and encouraging with spicy details, long views, a capacity for the unexpected insight. Now for something completely different: ‘The goose is a ...”

“... films were Great Expectations and Kind Hearts and Coronets. Having impressed the composer Richard Rodgers (Rodgers and Hammerstein) in New York, she was invited to star in The King and I and did so at Drury Lane. Profumo did not immediately gain office when Churchill won the 1951 election, but a year later he became parliamentary undersecretary at the ...”

“... On 22 February 1965, the fifth month of Harold Wilson’s first ministry, Richard Crossman recorded the following in his Diaries of a Cabinet Minister: Then Harold Wilson raised the issue of Anthony Howard. He has just been appointed by the Sunday Times to be the first Whitehall correspondent in history, looking into the secrets of the Civil Service rather than leaking the secrets of the politicians ...”

“... very problematically in love with his best friend’s wife. I knew little about his artist son, Richard – C.R.W. Nevinson – apart from his First World War paintings and prints. They are easy to like: influenced by Cubism but totally comprehensible – a sort of Modernism-lite. I went to the Nevinson retrospective at the Imperial War Museum hoping for ...”

“... These palaces were essentially status symbols. Italy was becoming a land of façades. Professor Richard Trexler, another old Florentine hand, is interested in another kind of façade. His long-awaited book is a study of ritual and formal behaviour in Florence from the 14th century to the end of the last Republic in 1530. Historical studies of ritual have ...”

“... Grandma Lu, her father’s mother, and she doesn’t need to be blamed outright to feel punished.Richard Beard’s extraordinary memoir of 2017, The Day That Went Missing, has the same starting point, a brother drowning, apparently within reach of a sibling unable to help. Richard was eleven in 1978, Nicky nine. They were ...”

“... out of the most hideous of crimes) to the pleasure she was said to have taken in murdering Martin Brown and Brian Howe? Again: how could anyone know? Given the profit that these papers were making out of their horror at her profit (an obvious point), not to say out of the horror they drew their readers into – given, that is, their own traffic in the ...”

“... any of them at Hogwarts, for instance). If one remembers them, the memory comes from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays, or even Tom Brown at Oxford, in which the medieval practice survives of allowing poor boys or young men to scratch an undignified education as ‘servitors’ to their betters, permitted to sit in on ...”

“... means to escape poverty. Hopeless rage smoulders throughout these communications. In 1797, William Brown of Benton, Northumberland was sent a menacing letter from somebody claiming to be a former servant, ‘turned away for no reason’, asking that £20 be left under a stone in Tynemouth: ‘me famalry are now starving the Butchers will let them have no more ...”

“... on, in 1760, he painted William Brooke, four times Mayor of Doncaster: a mercer dressed in good brown velvet with a great belly swelling above spread knees, and arms akimbo. This pose of the fat man of authority (it is similar to the one Ingres put M. Bertin the banker in) would be used again in the portrait of ...”

“... Johnson visited Pembroke College, Oxford and called on the master, William Adams. According to Richard Sher, Boswell wrote in his journal how dismayed he had been to see in the master’s library a copy of the quarto edition of David Hume’s Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects of 1758, handsomely bound in morocco leather. Boswell believed, Sher ...”