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“... century that was going on outside. The ménage starts off familial: a few servants, plus Mary Elizabeth Riordan, a talented and lovely piano student from ‘an immigrant family that had suffered major misfortune’. She leaves for the Sisters of Mercy Junior College and Langley marries a lady of good family called Lila van Dijk, who ‘had a mind to ...”

“... in Sylva for its being a guide for stewards and landowners. (You don’t need a spatula to enjoy Elizabeth David.) There was an ash tree outside our house in Kentish Town: I know because I had to ask the council to lop away some of the upper growth as it came closer to the bedroom window. (The ancient tree in James’s story is uncomfortably close to the ...”

“... Dublin Fusiliers, Lawrence’s Arab army, Jewish battalions (mainly Russian Jews recruited in North America), a French detachment and a few companies of Carabinieri, Bersaglieri and Cacciatori organised into a Distaccamento Italiano di Palestina (according to the official record, the Italians performed ‘important guard duties’). Much of the hard work ...”

“... taken the Commons by storm with his dazzling debating skills, and at 24 he was a Treasury lord in North’s ministry. It went to his head. ‘In an excess of vanity and presumption,’ Horace Walpole remarked, he acted as the leader of a party, ‘his arrogance, loquacity and intempernace raising him the enemies of a minister before he had acquired the power ...”

“... a speech from the throne commending the terms of the peace. In issue no. 45 of his periodical the North Briton, Wilkes attacked the effrontery of the prime minister, George Grenville, in obliging the king to speak in praise of a shameful treaty, though in fact the sentiments in the speech were well known to be those of George III himself. Where the speech ...”

“... A busy time in the courts brought a modest prosperity, a house in the suburbs and a partner, Elizabeth Darbyshire, whom he later married. Politics never lost its appeal, however. Radical movements were split over the degree of accommodation that should be reached with the progressive end of the mainstream. Jones favoured reconciliation with the John ...”

“... advocate of comparative studies; English literature would be read alongside Russian and American, North and South, all in their original languages (he hoped to extend to the Far East, too). He insisted on the importance and independence of academia: ‘A professor can speak out on national issues of science and scholarship,’ Sloman said, ‘as a scientist ...”

“... the refugees re-created their lives as farmers, merchants, mechanics and professionals in British North America, others sought out new positions in military service and imperial administration. Several, including the turncoat Benedict Arnold, placed their sons in the East India Company army. Others figured among the many ambitious, hard-up men who accepted ...”

“... when Donald Trump flew in to complain about a plan to put offshore wind turbines in the North Sea close to his luxury golf resort at Balmedie, near Aberdeen. I asked the Parliament’s press office if Sick Boy and Renton used the same room, maybe it’s the best one, they keep it nice for special visitors. ‘The scene was filmed in a committee room ...”

“... in Lords of the Lebanese Marches, based on field work he conducted in a Sunni Muslim rural area of North Lebanon during the early Seventies, before the recent civil war. This beautifully written book describes the culture of masculinity in its multiple refractions through violence and narrative, joking and play, a world where status and power are organised ...”

“... Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina. His reverence for the Virgin folded easily into his adoration of Hollywood’s golden age stars. But he also became something of a star himself. His early poems were inspired by queer desire and systematic derangement achieved through ...”

“... of England’s most disastrous kings’). Roberts tells us with his trademark thump that now Elizabeth II has allowed more than 200,000 pages of the Georgian Archives at Windsor to be published – 85 per cent of them for the first time – ‘it is at last possible to show that every single word quoted above about George III is completely ...”

“... 1975, by Mary McCarthy, as The Life of the Mind. The question that crops up, unstated, throughout Elizabeth Young – Bruehl’s lengthy and thorough biography, and in Bhikhu Parekh’s Hannah Arendt Made Simple, is this: how much of the Sixties survives to the Eighties? She comes across, certainly, as a good egg. She looks out of the back cover of Dr ...”

“... acknowledges, part of it collapsed into the river in the early 1800s. There was arable land to its north and east, so settlers could have moved away from the river and ‘the diseased swamps that would make New Orleans the great necropolis of North America’. And yet, as Powell concedes, this cramped geography would force ...”

“... the scene. Land-based lighthouses offer more graphic potential and seemingly generate less unease. North Foreland, which featured in the advertising campaign ‘You Can Be Sure of Shell’ in the 1930s, was shown close up, from the landward side, in Elwin Hawthorne’s design, but it has some of the brooding, uninviting quality that pervades the nearly ...”