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“... hills … lotus-eater land, a buddha-realm of flowers and delight which is really like old captain cook and herman melville’. Money is stolen from his pocket while he swims; he doesn’t care. ‘Other guys lost money too, but it’s all so good-natured.’ Wild pigs. Horses eating flowers. The tanker spewing out its oil, before the return to America. We ...”

“... and looking just like paint thinner or gasoline.And then there’s the aerial footage taken by John Wathen, or Hurricane Creekkeeper, that’s gone viral on YouTube, Facebook, other facets of the internet, and the media, including CNN. It shows great plumes of smoke rising from the sea, as the oil is burned off the surface. The flames are invisible but the ...”

“... refreshing: ‘A Cross swaying to and fro, a Christ with jerking limbs hanging onto it, a gaping John and a Madonna who in effect consists of a tangled clump of wool threads’. He does not wonder why such a completely unresolved drawing was preserved – unless it was by Michelangelo, in which case it would have been treasured as evidence of his tormented ...”

“... War, because strong language – like strong drink – is a way to alleviate despair. In 1930, John Brophy and Eric Partridge published a collection of British songs and slang from the war. They claimed that soldiers used the word ‘fucking’ so often that it was merely a warning ‘that a noun is coming’. In a normal situation, swear words are used ...”

“... woman who was constantly trying to help people out of their personal difficulties – offering to cook them meals, sending them flowers, showering them with concern – was recognisably the same person of whom Jim Prior complained to Hugo Young in 1981: ‘She hasn’t really got a friend left in the whole cabinet. One reason she has no friend is that she ...”

“... in the 1990s was self-imposed. But as Georgina Born makes clear in her definitive analysis of the John Birt and Greg Dyke eras, the consistent impetus came from government. It’s no surprise that Margaret Thatcher wanted to take on the BBC – if anything, the surprise is how long it took her. (In her first term, Thatcher’s main concern was with BBC ...”

“... coded message to students at an elementary or intermediate level: ‘Don’t try this at home.’ John Atkinson tries to discover the impact on Alexander’s historians of the end of the Roman Republic, looking for development between Diodorus and Curtius by way of Timagenes of Alexandria. I confess I had not paid much attention in the past to Timagenes, an ...”

“... question becomes: is it possible to reach the Dome by public transport without help from Thomas Cook, a limitless budget and a posse of native guides? At Hackney Central it looked iffy. Hackney, it strikes me, is one of those zones that can’t claim a centre. Hackney simply happens. It’s caught. Like impetigo. I’m one of those eccentrics who has ...”

“... words, it was all about his mother. In October 1937, when his mother had left him alone (with a cook, of course) in the family house, he wrote a letter marvelling at the pleasantness of Cooldrinagh without her. And I could not wish her anything better than to feel the same when I am away. But I don’t wish her anything at all, neither good nor ill. I am ...”

“... in favour of ‘traveller’, except when uninhabited tracts such as Antarctica are referred to. Cook was a genuine explorer when he scythed across high southern latitudes proving that there was no land, and no inhabitants, in an area where geographers had hypothesised a great southern continent. In the Pacific, he travelled, or ‘voyaged’, over seas ...”

“... of al-Qaida before 11 September 2001. All of this echoed other wrongful detentions, like that of John Walker in 1974, when the West Midlands police coerced an innocent Irishman into confessing that he was an IRA ‘brigadier’, ignorant of the fact that such a title existed only in the British army. This confession was nevertheless swallowed whole. Walker ...”

“... about capitalism or racism, your own complicity in both or either. Whether you are aunt or wife or cook or freemartin, all women are equally oppressed.Nowhere in the constitution of this utopia does it say that although yes, of course, it’s true that women’s reproductive rights and bodily autonomy most certainly are under attack in the US at present, the ...”

“... of her first novel behind her, Bedford got a contract to write an entire book about the trial of John Bodkin Adams – the Harold Shipman of his time – at the Old Bailey that year. The book begins with the judge’s entrance, ‘trailing a wake of subtlety, of secret powers, age’ and ends three and a half weeks later with the not guilty verdict. In ...”

“... viewed with dismay the lack of restraint and caution in O’Donovan Rossa’s violent rhetoric. John Devoy, one of the leaders of Clan na Gael, the main Irish nationalist organisation in America, believed, as Kenna writes, that O’Donovan Rossa ‘had given the British ample warning of his plans through a desire for notoriety and theatricality, thus ...”

“... realist? His engagement with the Communist Party – he had been a leader of the Chicago John Reed Club, the CPUSA writers’ group, and published journalism in The New Masses – contributed, but Wright’s relationship with the party had always been stormy, particularly when it came to aesthetics. His 1937 manifesto, ‘Blueprint for Negro ...”