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“... From David Hockney’s Lord of Misrule to its repetition on the back of the jacket, this book is a bull shot, like the cocktail at the bar in Langan’s Brasserie. It consists of Langan’s self-portrait, written in the sleepless marches, to which the art critic Brian Sewell has contributed a memoir of friendship which will come as a pleasant surprise to readers more accustomed to his inspired Sowerberry in the columns of the Evening Standard ...”

“... Arthur; we must reject him from our histories and, above all, from the titles of our books,’ David Dumville wrote in 1977; and he was backed up by, for instance, J.N.L. Myres in 1986: ‘No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian’s time.’ In his new book, Nicholas Higham cites neither opinion but certainly ...”

“... air of anxiety among the passengers, who included the American tycoon Alfred Vanderbilt and the Welsh mining magnate D.A. Thomas. The German submarine U-20 had already torpedoed three British cargo vessels off the Irish coast. At lunchtime on 7 May its captain, Walther Schwieger, sighted a four-stack passenger liner, clearly British, and dived to intercept ...”

“... contrast, there is: ‘Myself at 11, fisherman, child musicologist and budding atheist’. A Welsh Childhood is also strengthened by photographs, about a hundred of them, large and handsome: they celebrate the misty greyness and wetness of rural Wales, small, ruined houses in vast, numinous landscapes, properly illustrating some aspects of the author’s ...”

“... Foreign Parts. It bridges writing as different as the poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Kate Clanchy or David Kinloch, and the fiction of Christopher Whyte or A.L. Kennedy. Some of these poets and novelists are wary of each other. Jamie recently refused to read with Irvine Welsh because of what she saw as the misogyny of one of ...”

“... of women farmers is growing. While researching her book Bathurst rented a cottage on a 180-acre Welsh hill farm. Bert Howells, a round-shouldered man in wellingtons and an old Barbour, looked up as her car passed for the first time, ‘a clear assessing squint: good or bad, friend or foe’. The collies by his side were called Bryn and Come Here You Useless ...”

“... Simon Armitage) and The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (co-edited with Mick Imlah) – included Welsh. The early section of the Scottish Verse anthology also pulled in medieval Latin, Old Norse, Old English and Old French. American academic anthologists acted similarly. Since 1962, the Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M.H. Abrams and ...”

“... stupidity. Birkhead’s long-term guillemot study on Skomer was threatened with closure because of Welsh government cuts but has been saved by donations brought in by crowdfunding. Long-term studies are valuable, Birkhead argues, because ‘they will allow us to investigate environmental problems that we haven’t yet even imagined,’ just as ‘museum eggs ...”

“... or someone else very like them, trying again, any more than the failed referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1979 stopped Scottish or Welsh devolution, or the failed referendums in Denmark on Maastricht and Ireland on Nice prevented those treaties from being ratified when the people were given time to reconsider ...”

“... subjects aspiring to places in the Indian Civil Service. I don’t remember the Scots or the Welsh or the Irish being mentioned in this catalogue of the excluded. Uncomfortable with any nationalism except its own, this English critique of English still seemed to assume that literature in Britain meant anglophone literature published in London, and ...”

“... on incidents in his past. He seems to have thought a spiritual crisis appropriate for a serious Welsh boy, especially for one who was later to exploit Nonconformist enthusiasm when himself an agnostic. He therefore gave arresting accounts of his spiritual torments on finding that ‘there was no one at the other end of the telephone.’ According to the ...”

“... us, à propos of nothing in particular, that his new false teeth were ‘fitting him a dream’. A Welsh Arts Council photograph of Raymond has as its gratuitously spiteful caption a quotation from Dafydd-Ellis Thomas, ‘the best-cut tweeds on the Left’. Still more gratuitous is the sneering caption which Inglis has dreamed up for a photograph of Raymond ...”

“... too cleverly vivacious. The most valuable juxtaposition pairs two longish stories set in Scotland, David Craig’s ‘Jason and the Green Woman’ and John Murray’s ‘The Señor and the Celtic Cross’, which operate quite different ironies about the limits of civilised society. The latter story, told in a tormented parodic mélange of styles, recounts a ...”

“... tradition of Tory thinking about public transport. It was in the same genre as the rumour – even David McKie has been unable to turn up a precise source – that Margaret Thatcher once remarked that anyone who rode a bus after reaching the age of 26 was a failure. It also reminded me of a story Ken Livingstone liked to recite when he was leader of the ...”

“... to be gaining a presence not just in politics but in pop culture too. That same month, May 1976, David Bowie was photographed at Victoria Station on his return to Britain after two years in North America. Standing in an open-topped Mercedes, he appeared to give his fans some kind of open-handed, straight-armed – possibly fascist – salute. Soon afterwards ...”