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“... that the speaker is now a tennis tyro despondent over her lack of progress. ‘How do you return a ball of that speed and power? How do you do it? I see people around me doing it all the time and I try to imitate them.’ The linguistic features common to these two specimens may be a proper object of conversation analysis, as an example of the question form ...”

“... places he had always known.DeCarava was born in Harlem in 1919, growing up at the time of Aaron Douglas, Augusta Savage, Archibald Motley et al. His mother, Elfreda Ferguson, bought him art materials and enrolled him in classes. After high school, he worked in the poster division of the Works Progress Administration and studied at Cooper Union School of ...”

“... of Britons ‘going native’ to elude capture, or to infiltrate the ranks of the mutineers. Jim Douglas, the hero of Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters (1896), stays in the heart of occupied Delhi in the guise of an Afghan horse-trader. The leading man of A.F.P. Harcourt’s Jenetha’s Venture (1899), Roland Ashby, ‘was a perfect linguist ...”

“... In his masterful book Beyond a Boundary, he sets the rot of English cricket in 1932, with Douglas Jardine’s (remember Heffer’s ‘touch of the Jardines’) Bodyline tour of Australia. To recapitulate very briefly, Mr D.R. Jardine (Winchester and Oxford) devised a tactic to stop Donald Bradman’s run-machine by ordering two fast bowlers ...”

“... tour to Kenya. Some of his achievements on that tour were staggering – 46 runs off one eight-ball over; 225 runs in an innings lasting 70 minutes; a bowling spell of nine wickets for two runs – but you didn’t know how good the opposition was. When he began to play for Middleton in the Lancashire League, I followed his performances and it was clear he ...”

“... Henry seem, paradoxically, to have been inherited from a mother who was illiterate. Born Mary Ann Ball, the eldest child of a large family that had migrated from Tipton to Birmingham, she could not be spared from her labours at home during what should have been her schooldays, and when, in her late middle age, her granddaughter tried, unsuccessfully, to teach ...”

“... day as they circled the exercise yard.De Profundis, a 55,000-word letter addressed to Lord Alfred Douglas, written by Wilde during the final months of his two-year sentence, is a strange literary creation, a hybrid text. It was the only work he produced while in jail. On 4 April 1897 the prison governor informed the Prison Commission that each sheet of the ...”

“... conflict and in March 1964, and again in June, pressed the Conservative prime minister, Alec Douglas-Home, to advise President Johnson against extending the war into the North. Following his election victory in October that year, Wilson was advised by the Foreign Office that, with regard to Vietnam, ‘ministers should agree to support the United States ...”

“... good looking, ‘Pan-like’, sometimes otherworldly and distracted but also excited by pub games, ball games, songs, revelry, dancing, whistling. He retained his childhood passions: machinery, aviation, the Arctic, and liked exploring junkyards with his friend ‘Red’ Peggy Angus. Sooty tar engines and old gasometers were what Peggy called ‘the cat’s ...”

“... didn’t hint.’ Dogged tracking shots through the French trenches of World War One, an elegant ball on the eve of an execution; Laurence Olivier as a Roman patrician in the bathtub suggesting the joys of sex and power to the slave Tony Curtis; a cowboy riding a hydrogen bomb as if in a rodeo, an American strategy expert whose artificial arm keeps offering ...”

“... In the United States, ‘English’ can mean ‘spin’: a deliberate turn put on a ball by striking it so that it swerves. It’s a subtle epithet, perhaps recording a canny colonial take on the larger distortions inseparable from imperial rule. But the truth is that as the English invented ‘Great Britain’ and then began the process of large-scale colonisation, they put quite a lot of English on ‘Englishness’ itself ...”

“... novels, two generations later – Lady Louisa Stuart, whose Memoire of Frances Scott, Lady Douglas as she became, has been redeemed from the archives of the Border nobility, with the blessing of a former prime minister, Lord Home. The memoir appears to have been written at some point in the 1820s, and is addressed to Frances’s daughter in order to ...”

“... has traversed these paths, he has imagined Leigh Fermor’s experience of Easter with storks, a ball in Budapest, horseback from Budapest across the Great Hungarian Plain, a camp of gypsies, Great Bustards in Vesztö, the Archduke Joseph in Békéscaba, love-making (I divine) with some girl in Transylvania. Leigh Fermor’s method is to share cognition with ...”

“... judges offering superlatives on the jacket of Hugo Williams’s Collected Poems – Edna Longley, Douglas Dunn and Peter Porter – none is English. And yet Williams, born in Windsor during World War Two, the son of the English actor Hugh Williams, schooled by Life and Eton, a youthful toiler for Alan Ross’s London Magazine, an erstwhile globetrotter and a ...”

“... in his movies – by George C. Scott, James Mason, Peter Sellers, George Macready, Kirk Douglas, Nicole Kidman, Sterling Hayden; and in smaller roles, Slim Pickens, Peter Ustinov, Sue Lyon, Leonard Rossiter, Shelley Winters, Sydney Pollack – but there is never a trace of ensemble feeling. The actors, and for that matter the characters, are ...”