Baroness Williams of Crosby – better known as Shirley Williams – was one of the disenchanted ex-Labour Cabinet ministers who became the Gang of Four founders of the breakaway and short-lived Social Democratic Party.
She was a busy, breathless, tousle-haired intellectual who acquired an unwanted reputation for missing trains or going to the wrong venue for meetings. That was how she became affectionately known as Shilly Shally Shirley.
Once Lady Astor told her: “You will never get anywhere in politics with hair like that.”
And although in her early political life she surprisingly regarded herself as left-of-centre in Labour terms, she came to be reviled by the party’s left who denounced her as a traitor to the movement after her defection to the SDP.
During the First World War the British government persistently rejected calls to legalise marriages between a man and the widow of his brother killed in action. Drawing no distinction between blood bonds and those acquired by marriage, sections of the Church of England regarded these relations as incestuous. Bruised by the protracted debates over the passing of a parallel measure, the Deceased Wife’s Sisters Marriage Act of 1907, Prime Minister Lloyd George refused to act. Although rectifying this inequality of treatment between the sexes would have been relatively simple, he knew the dangers of interfering with the law in this matter.
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There may be no greater repository of analog information than the library, a glorious assembly of printed pages that can take us on adventures, educate us, and fill our days and nights with details of worlds beyond our own all free of charge. Today, there are roughly 116,867 public and academic libraries dotting the country. To celebrate National Library Week, we ve rounded up 25 fascinating facts about these irreplaceable institutions.
1. Benjamin Franklin started up a lending library in 1731.
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One of the oldest public libraries in the country opened in 1790 in Franklin, Massachusetts, where residents circulated books donated by Benjamin Franklin. The Founding Father once started his own lending library in 1731 in Philadelphia called the Library Company, but it required a subscription fee of 40 shillings.
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Emilio Foa was lured away from his old employer to Oka, the upmarket furniture brand, over a glass of wine.
He had helped to sell Rapha, the cycling label, to two heirs of the Walmart dynasty. During the courtship period with possible suitors, as its finance and operating chief, he also met Investindustrial - the private equity firm founded by Andrea Bonomi, a scion of the famous Italian industrial family.