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I don't suppose Mr. Fry could have foreseen his book becoming topical in quite the way it has. It's actually quite an entertaining, if slim, volume - Terry has a pleasingly mordant turn of phrase - of Robert Clifton's statue by the Trent he says, "Although never the most engaging nor flattering of memorials, [it] looks particularly forlorn in it's present location." Anyway, it confirmed my feeling that statues are relatively thin on the ground in Nottingham - possibly because of our much-vaunted 'rebel' tradition - and we don't seem to have anything particularly dodgy or in need of imminent pushing over and chucking in the river. My favourite story concerns the statue of Samuel Morley that used to stand outside the Theatre Royal - they took it down in 1927 because it was a traffic hazard, prepared a well-out-of-the-way spot for it in the Arboretum and then managed to drop it on Lister Gate when they were moving it into place, smashing it in the arm and the head. Apparently it "snapped near the ankles", thus demonstrating that the city was well ahead of the curve, statue-toppling-wise...

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