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“... this would mean proportionately 100,000 dead in France, 150,000 in the new Germany, and in Great Britain close to 120,000 dead. The newsfilm of funerals, grieving relatives, the details of killings and woundings that surface casually in conversation all form part of the – would the term be? – discourse of this holiday. In a damp bar just across the ...”

“... Tricks is a selection from his prolific writings as an essayist and reviewer. It is not unusual in Britain for a historian to win fame and fortune as a biographer: Pimlott’s achievement was to make the lives of Hugh Dalton and Harold Wilson – two Labour politicians with flawed personalities and flyblown reputations – into the stuff of compelling ...”

“... humour but ignoring almost everything else: The dominant school of fiction, still more so in Britain than in the States, remains character-driven and narrative-ratcheted, and whatever the changing nature of its cast and content – the underclass of Irvine Welsh, the denizens of Rushdie’s fables and those of other postcolonial Booker shoo-ins – it ...”

“... or two I actually imagined I could be responsible for the spread of foot and mouth disease across Britain. On my first acquaintance with the hill farmers of the Lake District, on a plot high above Keswick, I had a view of the countryside for tens of miles. I thought of the fields that had passed underfoot, all the way back to Essex, through ...”

“... and admiring detail, the product of Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar world in which the USSR and Britain would retain delimited spheres of influence within an international order whose overarching power would be the United States. Its founding conference at San Francisco was meticulously controlled and choreographed by Washington, a special unit of US ...”

“... Out of the Shelter (1970) recorded the encounter with ‘abroad’ after growing up in austerity Britain. Even Changing Places, still his funniest book and the one that made him famous, clearly reworked his own experience of going, as a lecturer in English at Birmingham, to be a visiting academic at Berkeley. And he has never hesitated to report directly on ...”

“... the heart of British politics, so as to entrench the idea that there are entire communities around Britain crawling with feckless, delinquent, violent and sexually debauched no-hopers. Middle England on the one hand and the chavs on the other.’ This was ‘taken to its logical conclusion’, he claimed, by the centre-right think tank Policy Exchange, in a ...”

“... cause to resort to arms, and always found the arguments to justify it. It is not so long ago that Ian Paisley, leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, invited the media to a night-time parade of hundreds of his supporters as they waved their gun licences and threatened, in the name of democracy and the Protestant people, to use their weapons if ...”

“... that the two places where truly destabilising populist politics have been let off the leash are Britain and the United States. Looking at what we have allowed to happen, Trump must be licking his lips. Under winner-take-all systems, people who are happy to gamble away their nation’s security only have to get lucky once. Let’s hope it is only once.Neal ...”

“... the three great intellects of the 20th century. Who were the others? he asked. Albert Einstein and Ian Gilmour, she allegedly replied. Let no one say that Margaret Thatcher was a slave to consistency. Within four years, the Einstein of British Conservatism had been sacked from the Cabinet. This is not Ranelagh’s only eccentric disclosure. As well as being ...”

“... Marxism that always lay beneath his belief that Parliament was the medium through which, in Britain, socialism could be achieved, his love of philosophy and big ideas for their own sake – these marked him, despite his impeccably proletarian origins, as an intellectual of a type more common on the Continent. Finally his extravagance of both personality ...”

“... NUM – Arthur Scargill in particular – as the embodiment of all that she held to be endemic in Britain’s economic decline: monopoly trade-unionism in a state industry subsidised well beyond the point of efficient market forces and economic sense ... to her, the special place which the mining industry occupied in the industrial landscape was a major ...”

“... Turpin’s ride lie much further back, in Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain, in which the story is told of a highwayman who had successfully established an alibi by riding in a single day, without a change of horses, from Chatham in Kent to York, where he arrived in the afternoon: the jury refused to believe such a feat was ...”

“... arranges things: Birkhead gets live zebra finches to mate with dead ones, Nicholas Davies and Ian Hartley make it possible for female dunnocks to take a third husband. Decades of accumulated work of this kind have changed our understanding of the nature of sex, reproduction and the different roles of male and female. From Darwin’s time up to the late ...”

“... together as a succession of details – not unlike the narrative of particulars that according to Ian Watt constitutes the ‘formal realism’ of the novel. Had Griffith already achieved a novelistic ‘formal realism’? Not exactly. As a storytelling medium, cinema lies somewhere between theatre and the novel, and Griffith remained pretty close to ...”