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“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... Unlike their late 20th-century descendants, contemporary Englishmen knew what that meant: an adult king, of the right religious persuasion, and with a family. Fifty years of that abnormal phenomenon, petticoat government, 45 of a monarch without an heir, and, more immediately, ten of the gloom and doom caused by a sterile war, economic distress and mounting ...”

“... you accord him the ultimate homage, and become an Elvis impersonator, remaking yourself as the King right down to the Queen Bess high collars and the heel-shaped sideburns the size of Italy; or else your favourite Elvis story will be the one in Albert Goldman’s biography, of how he nearly drowned in a bowl of minestrone soup – so bombed out one day on ...”

“... as something of a surprise to remember that thirty years before the Armada, Philip of Spain was king of the country he later attempted to invade. What was more, he had been a new kind of king, the consort of England’s first ruling queen, and one to whom England had violently objected before he had even set foot ...”

“... bred that hearty Race of Mortals who won the Fields of Cressy and Agincourt . . . The Renown’d King Arthur is generally looked upon as the first who ever sat down to a whole roasted Ox (which was certainly the best way to preserve the Gravy), and it is further added that he and his Knights sat about it at his Round Table, and usually consumed it to the ...”

“... Laudanum, Kenelme Sexnoth Pope, H.N. (Helga Nevvadotoomuch, c/o Lord Godmanchester (Gumster), The John Peelcroft Hadmanchester Podgoets, Night Slide Clubb, P.O. Box 1AA, BBC-wise, W.1, and others. The translations were just as elastic as these cartoon-rubber composites. In the Robert Lowell version actually used by the Sunday Times, ‘Spleen’ opens: I’m ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”

“... there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany. Mr ...”

“... or deepen my grasp of human possibility, as in their different ways the history of Thomas More or John Milton does. The extant marks of Shakespeare’s mortal passage don’t tell us anything we don’t already know about the world or the human. The works – various and ambiguous as they are – tell us something about both; the life doesn’t. Instead, far ...”

“... as the family banquet on Christmas Eve, the visit to the Sick Children’s Hospital to hear the King’s speech through the PA on Christmas afternoon, and visits to wealthy patients of my father’s some way up the twin river valleys from Aberdeen, I might well have run away screaming, tearing off my Graham of Montrose kilt and matching trews (tartan ...”

“... classroom-based teaching with online learning’. The new model has been piloted at Ark’s King Solomon Academy in the Borough of Westminster, and Ark staff have travelled to the US to visit the ‘reknowned [sic] Rocketship schools’. Rocketship Education is a chain of charter schools – publicly funded but privately managed – in ...”

“... it found no ‘credible’ or ‘meaningful’ evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate President John Kennedy, and the words are of course a sore temptation to suspicious eyes. Do they mean, as they seem to mean, no real evidence at all? Or no evidence to speak of; no evidence you could act on; plenty of evidence but all of it shaky; plenty of evidence but ...”

“... vision of upholstered modern life, as well as the tastes of its royal owners, Queen Mary and King George V. There was a working toilet made by John Bolding and Sons, and a gun room stocked with Purdey shotguns powerful enough to shoot flies. Artists created hundreds of paintings and books for its clubby, masculine ...”

“... valley of the shadow of death; make a joyful noise; go from strength to strength . . . The 1611 King James Authorised Version of the Book of Psalms – and of course of the entire Bible – is so deep in the English language that we no longer know when we are repeating its phrases. Inextricable from the beliefs and practices of its faithful for four hundred ...”

“... of Another’s Word: European Ethnography in the Middle Ages). A case in point is The Book of John Mandeville, at once the most popular and the most enigmatic of medieval travel narratives. Mandeville, purporting to be an English knight from St Albans, claimed to have travelled the world for 34 years before returning home in 1358 to compose his Book. The ...”