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“... for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves. OK? So they don’t get an idea for a while. They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ...”

“... given order is frozen into a system for decades on end, as at Vienna, Versailles, Yalta or Bretton Woods, but there comes a time when the logic of the system fails to hold. This is pretty much where we are now. In the early Eighties I used to give talks to the middle managers of a major oil company about the changing international environment. It was my custom ...”

“... how the act of lament could itself galvanise the old into something living:Very old are the woods;      And the buds that breakOut of the brier’s boughs,      When March winds wake,So old with their beauty are –      Oh, no man knowsThrough what wild centuries      Roves back the rose.De la Mare tried out ‘roams’, ‘roots’ and ...”

“... the purposes of the conversation; here, it is the ‘grand, otherworldly’ appearance, out of the woods, of a female moose on the moonlit macadam. Here we could say Bishop found the courage to say what she felt deserved commemoration in culture, joining herself implicitly to the line of Thoreau, Audubon and Moore. But where most other observers of nature have ...”

“... a fact he doesn’t mention in his account of the incident in his memoirs or even in his diary. John McCloy, FDR’s assistant secretary of war, described it as ‘the most gallant thing I’ve ever seen’. Macmillan wasn’t one of those not infrequent war heroes who in peacetime are mild and eager to please. He remained dauntless and daunting in ...”

“... because of her interest in folklore and her knowledge of the area around Coole and its people. ‘John Synge, I and Augusta Gregory, thought/All that we did, all that we said or sang/Must come from contact with the soil.’ Much of Yeats’s work on Irish folklore was, as Foster points out, a collaboration with Lady Gregory.Lady Gregory also wrote ...”

“... was born. The disillusionment was not slow in coming. One wave began on 28 May 1754, in the woods of the Ohio Valley, when British colonial militia killed a French-Canadian army officer, Joseph Coulon de Jumonville, who had supposedly been travelling under a flag of truce. A short time later, a large French force led by Jumonville’s brother defeated ...”

“... you can’t bring yourself to love it. It’s a position that has its advocates. A few years ago, John Mueller’s Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaida urged a relaxed attitude: far more has been spent on nuclear weapons than can be justified by any sensible political strategy; they aren’t of much military use; their proliferation ...”

“... furniture; a deep window ledge held a small number of books: The Highland Clearances by John Prebble, pamphlets on local flora, a field guide to birds, Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water. After we’d unpacked, we went for a stroll over the salt marsh. The tide was out, leaving creeks and channels. A bridge spanned the river that ran, swollen ...”

“... cows, hawking bread in the streets, scaring birds, bookkeeping for the parish overseer. Like John Clare, who escaped to the woods to read ‘Sixpenny Romances’ as a child, he loved books and hid them from stern elders who equated reading with laziness. Unlike Clare, he got money for books from stealing and used to ...”

“... sidelined in major decision-making. It was allowed to send just one representative to the Bretton Woods Conference of July 1944, for example, where the rules for a postwar international monetary system and plans for the International Monetary Fund and World Bank were drawn up. The bank was nationalised at the end of the war. The Treasury took over its ...”

“... a disgraceful young radical poet returning distractedly to his cottage after long scrambles in the woods. ‘He was the most interesting figure I ever saw,’ a child witness recalled later in life, still much struck. ‘His steps were often hurried, and sometimes he was rather fantastically arrayed … on his head would be a wreath of what in Marlow we call ...”

“... works that comforted and excited him. Jones lent him some unsold pictures and Ede acquired several Woods, Nicholsons and Wallises as well as Brancusi’s Poisson d’Or. Some were loans, some were gifts, others the outcome of complicated transactions, swaps and ‘the IOU and the Who-Owes-Who’ whereby Ede, whose finances Freeman confesses remain ‘something ...”

“... all who promoted evil in this country.’ We were at Mar-a-Lago for the premiere of a film about John Eastman, one of the lawyers who tried to overturn the 2020 election results. Buses were bringing in guests from the Hilton West Palm Beach; ‘red-carpet opportunities’ with Rudy Giuliani had been advertised. The film came out on the anniversary of the ...”

“... on to accuse the English of betraying their precious inheritance. The rot began, he said, with John Stuart Mill, who started off as a liberal but went on to swallow a toxic draught of German metaphysics and then succumbed to the feminist wiles of Harriet Taylor, who married him and led him astray. Under Taylor’s tutelage, it seems, Mill ‘slid slowly ...”