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“... be suited by such men, and such fortunes, and such lives. The ineffably confused but real Mrs Palmer at one point burbles of Colonel Brandon: ‘He is such a charming man, that it is quite a pity that he should be so grave and dull.’ The joke is not only, or entirely, on her.Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice are far blither works, with these ...”

“... and the argument over how to define and apply Constitutional freedoms begins to turn ugly. Judge Frank M. Johnson Jr, the great liberal Southern jurist on the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals, who former Alabama Governor George Wallace called an ‘integrating, carpet-bagging, scalawagging, bald-faced liar’, explained the flammable Constitutional argument ...”

“... surroundings, for Wasilla itself – quite unlike its rival and contemporary in the valley, Palmer, 11 miles to the east – is a centreless, sprawling ribbon of deregulated development along a four-lane highway, backed on both sides by subdivisions occupied by trailer-homes, cabins, tract-housing and ranch-style bungalows, most built since 1990. It’s ...”

“... This alludes to a poem Yeats had worked up from a Gaelic lament translated by the former IRA man Frank O’Connor. The poem’s title, ‘The Curse of Cromwell’, was calculated to gratify nationalists, and its acceptance of the thesis that peasant poets inherited the role of the bards as celebrators of the Gaelic elite connects with the republican ...”

“... leader to complain about the ‘strange dishes’ which weren’t ‘up to English standards’. Frank Forsdick and his men asked for ‘a bit of old English roast beef or a plate of fish and chips’ and beer instead of wine. It didn’t require the commercial vapidities of the Greenwich Dome – a Festival of Britain manqué – to reveal that such ...”

“... and expert on China, a man who fascinates Steiner and whom he wanted to write about in Frank Kermode’s Modern Masters series, published in the 1970s. Steiner had first seen Needham at a protest meeting against Anglo-American intervention in Korea in 1950, at which the distinguished scientist claimed to have incontrovertible proof of the use of ...”

“... ageing aunties, old people on their last legs – I choose suitably solid, old-fashioned names: Frank, Harold, Arthur, Nora, names of their period. Just. Because, of course, the personnel of these designated scrapheaps is altering. Ranged in vacant rows or stood immobile by a radiator, these shrunken creatures still answer to Hannah, Arthur, Peggy and ...”