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“... was a year younger than most of my fellow conscripts. I did basic training in the infantry at the Welsh depot in Brecon. I failed the officer selection board (WOSB), and was transferred from the Welch Regiment to the First Battalion of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, where I became an orderly room clerk. This was a piece of good fortune for me, but not for my ...”

“... England. The supper is very elegant, but so much in fashion is everything English that Beefstakes, Welsh Rabits & Porter is the most fashionable meal. I myself saw the Duke of Capriola, the Neapolitan Embassador, in his red heeled shoes, very busy at a great Beef stake, a dish I dare say he never tasted in Italy. Those dishes are as fashionable among the ...”

“... members in Britain – to the wider history of British society is one of the central concerns of Alexander Piatigorsky, an émigré Russian who teaches comparative religion at the School of Oriental and African Studies. Equipped with a phenomenological method and an encyclopedic knowledge of ritual, Piatigorsky is no muck-raker. ‘Who can speak of ...”

“... ah tell ye, doomed!’ – in order? The Enterprise/Transport/Lifelong-Learning minister Wendy Alexander fled in May, perhaps because McConnell crushed her under all those portfolios, but also, surely, because of the mismatch between her huge responsibilities and her limited powers. Holyrood has, it’s true, turned in good research and policy reports in ...”

“... mere sound suffices: stegê, Dio Chrysostom’s term for the roof of Pindar’s house that Alexander forbade to be burned, ‘at least resonates’ with Latin textum. Why not with Welsh teg, ‘beautiful’, or Turkish tek, ‘single’, or the Dutch island Texel – not to speak of tecknê, which at least is ...”

“... only as ‘tragic warnings’. For the use of a character as a model, it would be hard to beat Alexander’s deliberate and well-documented modelling of himself on Achilles. For Alexander, the epic was sufficient to ‘trigger desire and excite identification’ in the manner Warner attributes only to modern ...”

“... America fitted under the bulge of West Africa, something that the explorer and natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt had remarked on a century earlier. Humboldt believed the match showed that the Atlantic Ocean was a flooded valley; Wegener tried fitting the continents together. This revealed that many features – the hills of Newfoundland and the ...”

“... husband were not matched in Scottish literature until the ‘Bang to Rites’ section of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting, in which the self-confessedly rancid Renton has sex in a toilet with the heavily pregnant wife of his dead friend, whose funeral they are attending. Few conventional love lyrics survive in the Dunbar corpus – the amatory is used by him ...”

“... go. There’s a land of Giant Vegetables, and a lovelorn robot duck. And I particularly liked the Welsh-stroke-Native-American burial mound, designed like a gigantic Leyden jar, with, inscribed across the front of it, in Welsh-Indian runes: ‘Keep away. Especially surveyors. This means you.’ Unlike your usual ...”

“... you may even be glad of a wheelchair yourself.’ Until then, I had gloried in what the crippled Alexander Pope bitterly, and brilliantly, categorised as ‘all the arrogance of superfluous health’. For the next thirty years, there was not a day when I could not get up and do a day’s work. But Quentin made me grateful for every one of them, never taking ...”

“... were letters from the vice chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Archibald Nye, to General Alexander in Tunisia and from Lord Mountbatten, chief of combined operations, to the Mediterranean naval commander Admiral Cunningham. The letters combined personal details with information pointing to invasions of Greece and Sardinia. Montagu’s next step was ...”

“... ever being given intellectual reasons for doing so, obediently transcribing the Calvinism of Alexander Nowell’s Catechism or First Instruction of Christian Religion. At the same time, however, they were given the means of escape to a different mental world: instead of being taught the medieval Latin that had prepared their pre-Reformation forbears to ...”

“... 1714 for debasing government and oppressing the masses. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke and Alexander Pope argued this at the time, and Benjamin Disraeli made the same point when he stigmatised the Venetian oligarchy. Yet labelling the Whigs as the bad guys in this fashion, and indeed discussing 18th-century England in terms of internal violence in the ...”

“... Froude’s Life of Carlyle and his edition of Carlyle’s Reminiscences, a hundred years since Alexander Carlyle’s New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle, Froude’s posthumous My Relations with Carlyle, and Alexander Carlyle and Sir James Crichton-Browne’s The Nemesis of ...”

“... Chanson de Roland, El Cid’ (the incomplete and exceedingly obscure Gododdin, c. 600, is in early Welsh, which is closer to Breton than to Gaelic, but it is thought to have been composed in Scotland); moves on to the Bruce and ‘Scotland’s historically precocious sentiment of democracy’; then to the Wallace, ‘the most original and the greatest of ...”