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“... Hardy wrote in 1914 of his feeling ‘that we are living in a more brutal age than that, say, of Elizabeth’, which ‘does not inspire one to write hopeful poetry, or even conjectural prose, but simply make[s] one sit still in an apathy, and watch the clock spinning backwards’. For Henry James, the war seemed ‘to undo everything’: ‘My sense of what ...”

“... my wife, lived with her parents on Friston Estate, a farm 17 miles beyond Kitale, at the extreme north-western limit of the White Highlands of Kenya, the Trans-Nzoia. The farm was only four or five miles from the ridge which formed the border of the tribal homeland of the Suk, more properly called Pokot, a Southern Nilotic pastoral people. Europeans were not ...”

“... the offing, in the shape of Doris Kilman, history teacher and constant companion to her daughter, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, it seems, doesn’t care for anything very much apart from her dog, Grizzle. The whole house stinks of the tar used to treat the animal’s distemper. ‘Still, better poor Grizzle,’ Clarissa ...”

“... door that slams. Six months later he was dead – hit by a car when out walking, after dark, on a North Carolina highway. Accident or suicide? On this question there is still much argument, and the evidence is inconclusive. It is generally agreed, though, by his friends that in the past two years or so (Jarrell turned 50 in 1964) this imperiously vital ...”

“... been given to the city at the dissolution of the monasteries. A year later, on 3 March 1592, Queen Elizabeth issued a charter incorporating ‘the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin’ as ‘the mother of a university’ with the aim of providing ‘education, training and instruction of youths and students in the arts and faculties ... that ...”

“... French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, ‘hundreds – perhaps thousands – of huge bones poked out of the muck, like spars of a ruined ship.’ The captain and his soldiers had no idea what sort of creatures the bones had supported, whether any of their living kin were ...”

“... known as the royal numerals case, MacCormick complained, naturally enough, that the new queen, Elizabeth II, was the first Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom. Although the Court of Session in Edinburgh – the highest civil court within Scotland – rejected MacCormick’s suit, on the grounds that the style of the ...”

“... usually explained in terms of changing leadership, party organisation and material circumstances: North Sea oil, resentment over the poll tax, the closure of the Ravenscraig steelworks. Ben Jackson’s intricate account of the intellectual development of Scottish nationalism marks a highly original departure from the norm, and allows us to distinguish the ...”

“... life there, yet turned her back on the place fairly determinedly in her fiction. Her real name was Elizabeth MacKintosh, and she was the daughter of Colin MacKintosh, a fruiterer who had pulled himself up into prosperity and respectability from humble beginnings. His parents were ‘illiterate Gaelic-speaking crofters’; his father came to Inverness to work ...”

“... the Anne Royal, to the Downs in September 1619. He had previously held a household position under Elizabeth I; travelled from La Coruña to Valladolid as part of the delegation sent by James VI and I to ratify an Anglo-Spanish alliance in 1605; commanded an expedition to Guiana in 1610, enthusiastically supported by the imprisoned Sir Walter Raleigh; and ...”

“... Town, numbing Old Town, the Willamette running towards the wild Pacific, the great hydro-adventure North still pulling at the blood of New Yorkers and New Englanders, the logging gone and the Indians gone but for casinos and fireworks and dream-catchers, my little sister has to rise from the dead steel and broken headlights, my twin brother has to get himself ...”

“... the 1990s we would have called them cruise missiles; these days, we’d call them suicide drones. (Elizabeth Bowen did refer to them at the time as ‘droning things’.) It wasn’t just London. My mother, then a six-year-old child in Essex, remembers hearing their distinctive putt-putt overhead. She learned that when the engine cut out, the V-1 began its ...”

“... Sometimes,​ standing in the small wood that shields my house from the north, I whisper the word ‘Pigs!’ Within a second, bursting from the laurels, alert and obedient as no dog could be, comes a pair of Gloucester Old Spot gilts to nuzzle my hand. Or sometimes, if I am late with their afternoon bucket of scraps, they break out of their enclosure and hurtle across to bang their rumps against the kitchen door ...”

“... Jarrell as a poet at his best the equal of anybody writing in his generation. It begins with ‘90 North’, the poem that first attracted Wilson’s attention, and concentrates on the war poems (including the famous ‘Death of the Ball Turret Gunner’) and the poems from the last volume The Lost World, a book that got a surprising caning from several ...”

“... self-intoxicated laughter, is to understand the manifold potentialities of the word ‘front’. North Sea, First War, BNP, con, flash. Seabrook is a very mouthy writer, his rude tongue perpetually thrust into someone else’s cheek. He pronounces: Eliot sat here, he took a tram, he dined alone in the ‘white’ room. Look at his memorial, his Margate ...”