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“... areas it worked indirectly – through local sultans and rajahs, for example, or by allowing the hill ‘tribes’ their head. ‘There was a curious insubstantial quality to Britain’s Asian empire … The British governed, but they did not, strictly speaking, rule.’ In the Malay States it was done ‘by smoke and mirrors’. For military backup they ...”

“... was once more exotically planted than with the pines that grow here now, as the Edwardian botanist Reginald Farrer used to sow the seeds he brought home from the Orient by firing them across the water into the cliff with a shotgun. The church clock is striking five when we turn back, the waterfall now illuminated under its own self-generated power, the same ...”

“... year, up in Highgate. The address sounds pleasant enough – 6 Prospect Terrace, on leafy North Hill – but if he was there for reasons of health it was to no avail. He died there on 6 October 1852, at the age of 28, his head horribly swollen by cerebral dropsy or ‘water on the brain’. The informant entered on the death certificate is one of his ...”

“... Jane Austen’s novels’. He is supported, moreover, by an equally classic account of the writer, Reginald Farrer’s 1917 essay, which remarks: ‘Never again does the writer introduce a character so entirely irrelevant as Margaret Dashwood.’ They are right, of course. But such fighting terms from critics so unsafe to disagree with are useful in ...”

“... at the bedroom window! The tattered rendition of the Last Post, by a pair of insect-buglers on the hill opposite, didn’t help. A prayer was said; the bouquets deposited; the tremors persisted. I had yet to see any Night of the Living Dead movies at this point; but when I did, back in San Diego a few years later, alone in the cheerless TV ‘den’ of the ...”

“... a version of Branagh’s own Protestant family in 1969. Buddy, the Branagh figure, played by Jude Hill, lives with his older brother and hard-pressed mother (Catríona Balfe), while his father (Jamie Dornan) comes and goes: he works as a joiner in England. A British soldier quips that he hopes Pa isn’t a joiner in one of the new armed groups: there was a ...”

“... a disguise, a hunted life, all that is not for me, to whom you have been revealed on that high hill where beautiful things are transfigured. O sweetest of all boys, most loved of all loves, my soul clings to your soul, my life is your life, and in all the world of pain and pleasure you are my ideal of admiration and joy.’ Five days later, Wilde was ...”