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“... when Alexander Korda’s film Fire over England was released in 1937. It stars Flora Robson as Elizabeth I, and as the opening titles roll the voiceover sets the scene: ‘the free people of a small island’ defy the tyranny of a Continental power and ‘a woman guides and inspires them.’ Robson, firm of jaw and bristling with double-decker ruffs and ...”

“... Normans, with their castles, and later the neo-Palladians, who imposed rigid Italianate symmetry. Elizabeth, queen of ‘merry England’, was a Good Thing, ‘just, sensible and far-sightedly astute’, and under her the ‘stalwart Gothic tradition’ was largely protected from foreign infection. The Stuarts, on the other hand, were Bad, ‘despotic and ...”

“... to the industrial conflicts of early 20th-century America. A speech given by the labour organiser Elizabeth Gurley Flynn at a silk-workers’ strike in Paterson, New Jersey in 1913 inspired in him a sense of ‘the likeness of all human beings and their problems’, a feeling he could still recall in his eighties. The conception of socialism as the natural ...”

“... seen the republication of some American women writers of the mid-to-late 20th century, among them Elizabeth Hardwick, Jean Stafford (these two had been better known as Robert Lowell’s wives) and Lucia Berlin, whose luminous short stories seem to me as good as anyone’s. Now Picador have published Blue in Chicago, a collection of stories by Bette ...”

“... control of London were dashed at the Battle of Cheriton, after which the defeated commander headed north to Basing House, where he and what was left of his straggling army licked their wounds. On 21 May the victor, Waller, once again lined up Basing House in his sights but was ordered to Oxford instead. Still in the area, however, was Colonel Richard ...”

“... of Pennsylvania. The tenor and aim of the hearing were established early on by its chairwoman, the North Carolina Republican representative Virginia Foxx, who told the witnesses that ‘each of you will have a chance to answer to and atone for the many specific instances of vitriolic, hate-filled antisemitism on your respective campuses that have denied ...”

“... on an ongoing basis and the most recent ones [sic] … are available on our media centre.’ As Elizabeth Davidson, senior project manager for the post-2014 restoration, points out, once the first SOBC in 2021 found in favour of rebuilding it would have been possible to secure the structure internally and remove the scaffolding, which continues to cost a ...”

“... The river makes its way through traprock and sandstone to the level plain of the city, continues north to Hawthorne, then doubles back on itself and begins its southerly flow to Newark Bay, about twenty-five miles through manufacturing and industrial towns and suburbs, places like Garfield, Lyndhurst, Kearny and Harrison, where it hooks east, then south ...”

“... customers at our butcher’s shop. Like Professor Needham, Mrs Kettle denounced the invasion of North Korea by the Americans and their use of germ warfare, not a view I’d then seen put forward. I was at the meeting not because of any left-wing views, but because the war was of some personal interest to me, as in 1952 I was due to be conscripted and likely ...”

“... of the island. This ungainly little craft had run into a gale even more severe than the usual North Atlantic winter blows and broke radio silence to say she was in trouble. Archer had a fondness for the skipper concerned – in fact, he probably valued these boom defence, ex-trawler skippers more highly than anybody around, and perhaps with reason. So he ...”

“... up to 73,741, or nearly 60 per cent. The gross casualty rates among British infantry fighting in North-West Europe in 1944-45 could be even higher – in the 15th Division, 62.9 per cent of men, 72 per cent of officers – but ‘only’ 16.8 of the former and 28.7 per cent of the latter were killed. The death rate in bombers was exceptional. Charles ...”

“... story was ‘about the Jews’; and to others she said it wasn’t fiction at all, but ‘simply North Bennington’, the Vermont town in which she lived, and the people there, ‘the way they slaughter one another’. The lottery works in two stages. First, a family is chosen: the head of each household picks a slip of paper from a box. Then each member of ...”

“... and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years.Easter Saturday, 4 ...”

“... all about attracting men, though men often think it is. There is, for example, the iron rule that north of Derby no woman can wear tights on a night out. Why? How did Liz Hurley launch an entire career by wearing a dress much less extreme than many that Versace has shown on the catwalks of Milan? What happens when it goes wrong? Did Diana overdo it on ...”

“... having a go at ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, or even Molly Bloom, on her concert tours in the North of Ireland in Ulysses. They are songs of love and loss, and many of them were written while Walter and Agnes Skrine were ranching in Alberta, having moved to Canada after their marriage in 1895. The Skrines were true imperialists: Canada was as much their ...”