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“... even the names of the poets – Charles Tomlinson, or David Gascoyne, or Robert Conquest, or John Holloway, or Christopher Middleton, or Geoffrey Hill – stood for a world that was fully England. Looking at the list of poets was like having one’s Irish nose pushed up against the polished glass of a posh window in some imaginary Big House. But it was ...”

“... Wilkin, who printed almost all of her works; and the one-time Oxford philosopher and theologian John Norris, who encouraged her thinking and who in 1695 published their Letters Concerning the Love of God, thus saving Astell’s letters to him from the abyss into which much of her correspondence fell. Her opening letter, written on 21 September 1693 when she ...”

“... are occupied. There’s no sign of the superstore, but the promised food outlets are open: Papa John’s Pizza, Burger King and Greggs. One evening I drove down a dark country lane on the edge of Wyberton to the home of Richard Austin, who led the Bypass Independents to victory in 2007. He’s in his eighties now. His wife, Alison, is also involved in local ...”

“... the nation that existed between Margaret Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ and John Major’s ‘it’s time to understand a bit less and condemn a bit more.’ I felt for the boy being led away but also for the boys leading him, and I believed there was not only a terrible death beyond what we could see there, but lives too, the life of a ...”

“... Andrewes, for example, he can break in on his own prose and say, ‘I was writing last week on John Dos Passos,’ and then go on to make a comparison between the two authors’ respective forms of revulsion from industrial society. Describing himself as ‘a concision fetishist’, Wilson recommended that the literary journalist should steer a path ...”

“... would have been much more attractive to me with cropped hair and in evening dress’); Wells looking ‘fat, brown and perky’; Chesterton ‘enormous, streaming with sweat, his hair dripping’; Arnold Bennett ‘very pert and looking every inch a cad’; Churchill having the appearance of ‘a drug-taker’. Perhaps there isn’t anything for me ...”

“... building, a 16th-century revision of the 13th-century church founded by the Knights of St John. The Hole is a statement and it is properly capitalised. The labourers, a self-confessed art collective, work the Hole by hand, with pick and shovel, turn and turn about: four days to complete a grave shaft, without any of the tortured grinding and ...”

“... proper to “reconstitute” a Jewish state which has not existed for two thousand years,’ H.G. Wells once remarked, ‘why not go back another thousand years and reconstitute the Canaanite state? The Canaanites, unlike the Jews, are still there.’ The modern Palestinians are a people of various ethnic origins, descended from the conquerors of Palestine ...”

“... just finished Ashley Kahn’s absorbing history of a date, ‘A Love Supreme’: The Creation of John Coltrane’s Classic Album.* Trane was a nice sheets-of-sound antidote to the ormolu, love-nests and scheming courtiers of the Ancien Régime. Yet despite having a workable assortment of Mulligans and Bakers and Konitzes, I was also feeling vaguely ...”

“... significant force to his left. In American politics, a respectful Communist Party or an awkward John L. Lewis were marginalia. In Brazil, on the other hand, the PT is a central presence on the national stage. It is often described – even by its enemies – as the only real political party, with a genuine mass membership in the country. There is an element ...”

“... Royal Dutch-Shell, BP-Amoco, TotalFinaElf and Chevron-Texaco), elephantine oil corporations with wells, pipelines, refineries and subsidiaries in almost every country on earth, and collective sales revenues of more than $500 billion (almost twice the GDP of sub-Saharan Africa), have scaled the walls of the White House. In a bullish five years in the 1990s as ...”

“... Northampton, Truro, Nottingham, Redhill, Gillingham, Epsom, Dartford, Maidstone, Tunbridge Wells and the Isle of Wight warned they were no longer able to provide comprehensive care. The recommended safe limit for the number of beds that should be occupied by patients in any one hospital at any one time is 85 per cent. Across England as a ...”

“... where I boxed rather than fenced, because he had been coached when in the Army by Bombardier Billy Wells, the sometime British heavyweight champion.My upbringing, in short, was a preparation for two alternative roles: devout Jew and British Army officer. This seems to have been foreseen from the time of my birth, for they gave me a couple of good Jewish ...”

“... before it fell, France wanted to stop him from getting it.The object was to disrupt or destroy oil wells, pumping stations and refineries, and to block supply routes to Germany by rail or along the Danube. A plan was drawn up to blow up the cliffs at the Iron Gates, where the Danube narrows and cuts through the Carpathians in a series of turbulent ...”

“... can’t carry much at my age. A little pint bottle is quite heavy.’ He introduced me to John Russell, an 88-year-old ex-engineer in a residential care home. ‘I saw one old lady trying to stagger off with six bottles,’ Russell said. ‘They were carried for her by a complete stranger.’ He introduced me to Joan Bufton, whose daughter needs ...”