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“... By the closing pages, Alice – denuded of most of her mystery – has more than a whiff of Holland Barrett about her. There is even a touching if Bettelheimish childhood trauma to illuminate her nature. Yet some of the best moments in the book are the nightmarish visions of Satan, of bloodthirsty weasels, of Alice standing on her path in the sun ...”

“... is pure ‘Carry on up the Corner Flag’. Later, Kuper interviews the Preston North End winger Tom Finney about the Cup Final of 1941, when Preston beat Arsenal. Wasn’t it odd, he asks, to play the final in bombed-out London? ‘I wasn’t all that interested in the war when I was playing,’ Finney answers. ‘I was only 18. And the main concern was to ...”

“... by his treasonable démarches in England and America before the war, and in Sweden, Switzerland, Holland and Turkey during it. He knew the death he faced would be peculiarly horrible. What he did he did for his country. He was a patriot. But was he also a nationalist? Grant Duff thought so, and their friendship came to grief over their differences. But the ...”

“... were peripatetic. In 1924, after a second working voyage across the Atlantic, he jumped ship in Holland and made his way to Paris, where he eked out a living as a sous-chef cum plongeur. Stays in Cuba, in Haiti, in the Soviet Union (where he spent ten months in 1932-33) and in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War allowed him to connect his own experiences of ...”

“... In 1834, T.B. Macaulay left Holland House to unaccustomed silences, and set sail for Madras, where he was to save £30,000 and draft the penal code. Indian leisure inspired him to reread Greek. Thucydides, Euripides, Demosthenes, all got good marks. Fiction came off less well. Macaulay was a great reader of novels (to his father’s and Clapham’s distress); the Governor-General’s court wept over his copy of Clarissa ...”

“... of a hyperactive highlighter pen. When he asks, rhetorically, ‘Did Marvell, in [describing] Holland “As but th’off-scouring of the British sand”, recall Nedham’s description in 1650 of Scotland, a “country which sticks like a scab upon the fair body of this unfortunate island?”’, the only possible answer is ‘no’. But although one can ...”

“... that Mr Berkshire had been fined for dangerous driving, after knocking down a Quaker woman on Holland Street; that they were robbed in 1838 by 16-year-old Jane Smith, the daughter of their maid, whom they prosecuted for taking, along with a lot of silver cutlery, three watches and fourteen gold rings. I picture the ...”

“... of 1941; expulsion from Glasgow School of Art for organising a student strike; travels through Holland with the Non-Combatant Corps; working as a shepherd with a dog called Finn MacCool; and the destruction of all his paintings at the end of the 1950s. This was followed by a stay on Rousay in Orkney, an island promoted to Finlay’s paradise lost when he ...”

“... wars showed how to ‘brew up’ a tank with the aid of Molotov cocktails. Also at Osterley, Tom Wintringham, who had commanded a battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, taught that ‘two or three determined men with a length of tram line or stout iron bar can often [sic] put a tank out of action’ (by thrusting it between track and ...”

“... say, been carrying Buckhurst’s letters we should understand how, later on, he knew his way about Holland and Zeeland; and we might get a jolt when we remembered that Buckhurst in his younger days had been Thomas Sackville, joint author of the original English blank-verse tragedy, Gorboduc. He had also been recommended for a translation of Lucan’s epic ...”

“... Where the Californian school endow lectures with the multimedia pleasures of an evening with Tom Lehrer or Jools Holland, McGann’s style at the lectern as on the page gets nearer to George Eliot reading her works. Yet the Foucauldian Californians are programmed pessimists, who find the individualism, colour and ...”

“... he was eating when he read them: La Nouvelle Héloise with pain au beurre and a pot of coffee, Tom Jones with a roasted partridge. The contents of Rat’s picnic basket contains the world of The Wind in the Willows; the aroma of a bubble and squeak prepared by the gaoler’s daughter cheered up Toad in his prison cell; bacon and broad beans and a macaroni ...”

“... There are several sardonic contributions here from members of the 1947-8 England team that beat Holland 8-0. Italy 4-0 and Portugal 10-0. For such triumphs the England players got a £10 appearance fee and a third-class train ticket home. And maybe a ‘well done’. Just around the corner lay the 1953 defeat by Hungary, and a new epoch for English ...”

“... would read or go back to work.’ ‘Architecturally politicised’, the Smithsons sent Simon to Holland Park comprehensive, designed for the London County Council by Leslie Martin. ‘It was chaos,’ he remembers. He was bullied and his parents’ way of life embarrassed him, though later, he says, he came to see that his childhood had been ...”

“... is whether such a concatenation represents a cultural phenomenon or a happy accident of the kind Tom Stoppard plays with in Travesties, about Zurich in 1916. It’s worth recalling that all the characters in that play were ‘taken from history’, including the narrator and master of ceremonies, Henry Carr: but as Carr says of one of the more illustrious of ...”