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“... Richard Holt begins his book on French sport with two misleading observations. In the one, he recalls that when, in the course of his research, a pile of books on football or on cycling arrived on his desk at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his neighbours were bemused by his reading material. How extraordinary that he never seems to have found himself sitting next to one of those readers who begins his day’s work with a careful perusal of L’Equipe or Paris-Turf ...”

“... of the virtue of toppling a democratically elected government was a former investment banker and English public schoolboy called Korn Chatikavanij. All the foreign journalists in Bangkok know Korn, and a conversation with him is one of the pleasures of any reporting trip to Thailand. You meet him in the lobby of one of the big hotels, or in his office above ...”

“... authority, but since all that stands between Open and Closed is a five-bar gate it’s maybe English Heritage’s way of turning a blind eye. 11 January. The doorbell goes around noon. I’m expecting Antony Crolla, the photographer, so don’t look through the window and open the door to find what I take to be a builder with a loose piece of flex in ...”

“... Odenigbo; Olanna, rich and beautiful, who is Odenigbo’s girlfriend, and later his wife; and Richard, a white Englishman and Olanna’s sister’s lover. It spans the decade to the end of the Biafran war of 1967-70, in which more than a million people died. Its focus is the impact of the war on these characters and the characters they interact with. The ...”

“... Without Richard Norton-Taylor of the Guardian, there would be no Belgrano affair, and doubtless Mr Clive Ponting OBE would be plying his way, ever upwards, in the Ministry of Defence. This is no exaggeration. Simply a statement of fact. I am in a position to know. However right Paul Rogers, Lee Chadwick, Arthur Gavshon and I may have been, the fact is that without the sustained interest of Guardian readers, and, in my case, the Labour Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on ...”

“... More drew on Sallust and Tacitus to compose his study of tyranny in The History of King Richard III. Shakespeare, inspired by More’s history, departed from it in loyally contrasting Richard with his virtuous Tudor successors. More’s praise of the first two Tudors could hardly have been more perfunctory. To ...”

“... when leisured gentlemen in oak-panelled libraries composed grand Whig narratives of the triumph of English liberty: not only would Russell inherit an earldom, but his ancestors had played a central role in the political history of England. Conrad was the son of Bertrand Russell by his troubled third marriage, and had an understandably fraught upbringing, but ...”

“... was his rejection of the name his parents had given him: from his teens he called himself Richard. A sparkling-eyed poet who played rugby at school, he caught the eye of many women. In his youth he had a taste for velvet jackets and bow ties; he had studied some Greek, and relished the Romantic Hellenism of Keats’s Endymion, whose famous first line ...”

“... The other, less flattering image comes from the gathering in the Queen’s Gallery to hear Richard von Weisaecker make an address. The President of West Germany, speaking a crystalline, virtually unaccented English, spoke for about half an hour with restraint, wisdom and the quiet earnest of a man gravely engaged ...”

“... English​ Work’, opus anglicanum, was a luxurious kind of embroidery made in England in the 13th and 14th centuries, used to decorate ecclesiastical vestments – copes, chasubles, dalmatics – as well as banners, book bags, seal covers, cushions and other objects. Fabric grounds of linen, wool and silk were covered in figural scenes and rhythmic or sinuous ornament which shimmered with threads of coloured silk, silver and gold, and sometimes even pearls and precious stones ...”

“... unreconciled to this decision was the bombast of Churchill, in which the silver prose of Augustan English was, as I saw it, melted down into racist rhetoric. I was not inclined to see any big difference between anti-semitism and anti-Germanism since for me the original evil in each was to see people in terms of nations or races. The arrangement was that I ...”

“... tired of Italian opera’ – which was regarded as the apotheosis of everything effeminate and un-English. The experiment ‘secured the virtual extinction of original English music for more than a hundred years’. Richard Luckett will have no truck with cultural snobbery of this ...”

“... centuries after the Roman Empire had ended. We live now in a scientific world as monoglot in English as medieval scholarship was in Latin. From 1880 to 2005, the fraction of the world’s scientific literature published in English increased from 35 per cent to more than 90 per cent. It’s not just that there are a lot ...”

“... Ireland has less of a tradition of literary realism than England, though for an English critic to say so may require a degree of diplomacy. It may sound like saying that Ireland is deficient in realism in the same way that a nation might be deficient in hospitality or human rights. This is because realism is one of those terms which can be both normative and descriptive, like ‘nature’ or ‘culture ...”

“... ruthless kings rebuilt it (Edward III, then Henry V), infuriatingly self-indulgent kings lost it (Richard II, then Henry VI). The uselessness of the two latter monarchs had led to their murder by ambitious would-be replacements; nobility had been so unimpressed by the victims’ performance on the throne that they stood aside and let the assassinations ...”