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“... The reign of James I has long been considered a period in which patriarchal orthodoxy revived in an especially virulent form to counteract 45 years of female rule. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski quotes King James’s advice to his son to illustrate what she frequently calls the era’s ‘dominant ideology’: Ye are the head, [your Wife] your body; It is your office to command, and hers to obey; but yet with such a sweet harmonie as she should be as ready to obey, as ye to command ...”

“... fishing, shooting, whoring, drinking, fathering kids, being a friend to F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce etc. The only way they noticed I injured myself was because I could not spell hemmorage and still cannot. But it is very easy to injure yourself up here. Everybody is drunk all the time – it is the thing to be, like snotty in England – and your ...”

“... category and order. Genji, as one might expect, writes exclusively to women (including Mandy Rice-Davies, the Andrews Sisters and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsay), and displays an endearing capacity for romantic aberration, as when he assumes from her name that Barbara Windsor must be one of our royal house, the Third Princess after Di and Fergie. Being the ...”

“... techniques of honey-trapping, blackmail and counter-intelligence in a manner that owed more to James Bond plots than to psychometrics. Throwaway remarks, that the candidate is just a ‘puppet’ to the campaign team and that ‘facts’ are less important than ‘emotion’, look shady when caught on a hidden camera, but they’re not categorically ...”

“... media empire was a piece of mistaken reporting. For two years a handful of people – Nick Davies at the Guardian, the MP Tom Watson – kept insisting that the problem was bigger than a couple of ‘rogue’ journalists misbehaving at the News of the World. But whatever they said, and however often they said it, the world went on much as it had ...”

“... Brexit Party fielded two former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party – Claire Fox and James Heartfield – among its MEP candidates. Support for no deal correlates directly with age, to the point where the majority of over-sixties now express support for Farage. It is also most entrenched among the financially secure. The typical no dealer is a ...”

“... an income and an education. She was influenced by the Swedenborgian beliefs of her first teacher, James Buchanan, a family protégé endowed with unusual meekness: We were all five of us very tyrannical towards him but he never resisted our tyranny never! ... I remember often, we made him read to us at meal times, & would not let him eat anything. Our nurse ...”

“... at the world from within double-glazed, centrally-heated rooms permeates many of these novels. Davies’s sketch of a character in The Element of Water could stand as a warning to all modern narrators: ‘Quantz, trained in the Canaris school of Intelligence but long returned to the Navy, couldn’t quite slough his habit of cynical observation.’ The ...”

“... powers, and few Plaid and Cymdeithas activists felt any enthusiasm for such a toothless body. Ron Davies, the valleys boy who eventually masterminded devolution, thought that ‘English-speakers in the south of Wales voted No because they didn’t want to be dominated by Welsh-speaking northerners, and the Welsh-speaking northerners voted No because they ...”

“... novelists thus honoured is as exclusive as the strictest Leavisite (if any remain) or St James blackballer could wish: D.H. Lawrence (seven vols), Virginia Woolf (six vols), Thomas Hardy (seven vols) and Katherine Mansfield (four vols). The Conrad project, begun in 1983, is moving to its close with this, the sixth instalment of what will be an ...”

“... verse. This nostrum begs many questions, but it remains a good rule-of-thumb. By this test, Clive James is a true poet. Line after line of his has a characteristic personal tone, a kind of end-stopped singingness which is almost independent of what it says. The following are taken at random from Other Passports: Like injured ozone to angelic wings ...”

“... brackish and personal way, elements of the classical tradition (their Economist Building in St James’s was a well-crafted, contextual work for an establishment client), it was all over for Banham – it was a betrayal, after which he went to look elsewhere for his architecture autre. The nearest​ that any of the Brutalist revival volumes published in ...”

“... reality for most punters must have been closer to Carry On Camping, with Bernard Bresslaw and Sid James making a pathetic pilgrimage to a nudist camp in order to gaze longingly at the ‘birds’ – pop-eyed, helpless and fundamentally out of the running. What Williams and the leering, pickle-nosed James had in ...”

“... Each and every​ place in the life of Kenneth Clark has been investigated by James Stourton, from the country house in Suffolk where, as a boy, Clark judged the dresses of female dinner guests, to the château in Normandy belonging to his second wife, Nolwen, where, in his later years, he tried to find ways to communicate with the lovers who had once hoped he would marry them ...”

“... by the index. There’s Bette Davis and Joe Davis and Sammy Davis Jr. There’s Basil Dean and James Dean, Jack Warner of Dock Green and Jack Warner of Hollywood. Jayne Mansfield lines up alongside Mantovani, and Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery is discovered between Maria Montez and Dudley Moore. Kim Novak and Ivor Novello are neighbours, but then so are ...”