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“... in need of constant protection. Menacing ‘jungles’ have become the exotic ‘rainforests’ of David Attenborough documentaries, shrinking islands of environmental purity. The adjective ‘wild’, once applied to the savage creatures and barbarous landscapes of postlapsarian nature, has been reduced to a mark of culinary approbation. In Ruth Pavey’s ...”

“... Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell. That day, as we trudged past Greenwich … a tug skipper yelled gaily across the water: “Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!”’ The writer A.P. Herbert recorded that. And it was ...”

“... debatable. It’s a shocking story, with one of the victims having been battered almost to death. David Cameron is quick to move in and claim the crime is evidence of ‘a broken society’, conveniently ignoring the fact that Edlington, the village in question, is smack in the middle of what was a mining community, a society systematically broken by Mrs ...”

“... he has a ferocious aversion that is never explained), and ‘the mob of Welshmen who write in Welsh ...’ At any rate, and oddly enough, France – specifically the France of Ronsard, from whom he translates four poems, two of them very well – gives Grigson what England doesn’t. And yet he seems not to have though through the implications of that ...”

“... calibre and pack him off to France to discover Jean-Marie Le Pen’s followers celebrating their Welsh origins (‘nos ancêtres les Gallois’)? True, this is Muggle carping but Johnson is never slow to write to the LRB, castigating the editors – and contributors – for errors great and small. The book is a trove of tall stories and good ones, digs at ...”

“... Paul Flynn has made his front bench debut as both shadow leader of the house and shadow Welsh secretary. Corbyn and his shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, have also been abandoned by several of the high-profile economists they signed up as advisers in 2015, including Thomas Piketty and David Blanchflower (who ...”

“... The Battle of Ideas was opened by Claire Fox, gallus, Manchester-inflected – though she’s Welsh – and wearing her special speaking outfit: scarlet A-line jacket, slinky zebra top, bikerish white silk scarf. She paid ‘particular tribute’ to the sponsors: ‘In an atmosphere where big business is given a bad name, it’s fantastic to work with a ...”

“... and corporations. The authors are keen to let us know that their proposal was backed by David Cameron and presented to business leaders at Davos. But leaders change, and you wonder what a Special Economic Zone backed by Donald Trump or Theresa May might look like. Either Betts and Collier have found a brilliant way to harness the dynamism and ...”

“... of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap ...”

“... be cut. Or a future government could choose to abolish them, as the radical free marketeers of David Lange’s Labour Party did when they came to power in New Zealand in the 1980s. Many British farmers support Brexit. Others fear it would destroy them. The National Farmers Union has come out against, arguing that without subsidies, most British farms would ...”

“... Leman Street to Cannon Street Road, all-night clubs with noisy jukeboxes, packed with Irish or Welsh prostitutes, many of whom died young as a result of illegal abortions or drug-related illnesses. These pimps and bullies, some of them Bengali like their customers, anticipated the criminal behaviour that community spokesmen claim is only a recent ...”

“... a map on the warm bonnet of the car, catching at its flapping corners in awkward gusts of Welsh wind. We are on a camping holiday, we are lost, and he is trying to tame the map so we don’t get loster. The high, solid hedgerows obscure the view and are not marked on the map. Nor are the wild raspberries that grow in the hedgerows. Nor is the ...”

“... immigration lawyer and an accountant working in one of London’s temples of public art. ‘Irish, Welsh, Iraqi, Bengali … three Bengalis. And myself, English,’ Quinn said. It’s the sort of diversity that might have pleased Bevan. But the government wants Quinn out.In the 1990s, Quinn was officially recognised as too sick to work as the result of a ...”

“... that the aim of Union and Empire had all along been to foster this better class of Scottish and Welsh nationalism. Some in their audience are of course bound to think, if it has been so marvellous then might not more be better still? Ah, it would bring disaster! is the official reply – the agonising abyss of separatism etc. But just why would healthy ...”

“... at a million pounds apiece, will be painted European green and dispersed to other barracks. David Cameron announced in December 2013 that the troops could come home because their mission had been accomplished. ‘The prime minister’s declaration of victory amounted to an instruction to the British public to forget about Afghanistan,’ Jack ...”