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“... An anointed king of England hadn’t taken one of his own subjects for a wife since before the Norman Conquest, so why did Edward? Certainly, he was ‘wild with desire’ for Woodville, as Penn notes, and ‘used to getting what he wanted’. Penn opts for an Anne Boleyn theory of events – in Woodville, Edward ‘met his match’. If he wanted to sleep ...”

“... ends, sooner or later. The logic of not knowing why we are in Vietnam, to borrow a phrase from Norman Mailer, is that we shall scarcely know why we are anywhere, including home. Apocalypse Now Redux contains a whole miniature film within the film, twenty-five or so restored minutes, in which Willard’s group comes across an isolated French plantation, and ...”

“... technology. The Domesday Book was the first and BSE might be thought of as a tardy riposte to that Norman intrusion – the disease, after all, has crossed the Channel in the opposite direction. In any event, it is clear that the story Phillips tells is peculiarly English, to the point that some Scottish scientists, Welsh public health doctors and Northern ...”

“... that our old home had been knocked down. Not only knocked down, but replaced by a hideous piece of white-box modernism, with a poser’s narrow swimming pool and a triple-height atrium overlooking where the garden used to be. The punchline was that this new development was empty and abandoned too. I felt, of all unexpected things, a wave of relief. The only ...”

“... become ardent Nazis). But his career as a journalist began when he wangled a job as assistant to Norman Ebbutt, the Times correspondent in Berlin. Ebbutt and Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of the Times, soon realised what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully ...”

“... East. In an observation which is on a par with his wife Midge Decter’s about Libya and the IRA, Norman Podhoretz complains about the ‘mindless bias’ of the press in favour of terrorists and Yasser Arafat. In fact, as everybody except Mr and Mrs Podhoretz knows, the American press has been biased in favour of Zionism. Discussion of Middle Eastern ...”

“... or so after the interview in Manhattan, I was arrested by a vision of scarlet socks covering frail white calves beneath billowing Bermuda shorts: not, at that era, a part of the expected scene on Nassau Street in Princeton. It was Artur Sergeevich, now removed from New York to live on Linden Lane, in the Mediterranean villa provided by the philosopher Jacques ...”

“... other musical forms.’ He goes on to argue for this with all the acumen and none of the irony of Norman Tebbit arguing for the aesthetic claims of page-three girls (Rubens painted naked women, too). Thus Lanza: ‘Judging from their literature, the Greeks were rarely without some kind of perpetual musical soundtrack’; ‘Gregorian chants most likely ...”

“... tale. Anti-semitism was not uncommon in postwar Britain, whether among the establishment (Montagu Norman, for example, the governor of the Bank of England, was notoriously anti-semitic) or on the street – in 1947 there were anti-semitic riots in several British cities. In 1948, there were race riots of a different kind in Liverpool, when ...”

“... ring, as she said she would.Ionce​ went to a fancy dress party as Beauvoir: I wound a black and white scarf round my head as a turban, but people kept asking who I was supposed to be and I kept having to get my copy of Le Deuxième Sexe out of my back pocket to explain. I now think this might have pleased Beauvoir, who didn’t want to be remembered for a ...”

“... enough. Yet elsewhere, in a rare moment of apparent inadvertence, he paradoxically classifies the Norman monarchy after the Conquest as absolutist. There have been so many perverse claims for English exceptionalism in this period that it would be churlish to make too much of this contradiction. But it points to a more general problem. The tacit modulation ...”

“... the ‘negation of exile’ but also, and paradoxically, to reinvent themselves as citizens of the white West – in Herzl’s words, as a ‘rampart of Europe against Asia’. Brit Shalom’s vision of reconciliation and co-operation with the indigenous population was unthinkable to most Zionists, because they regarded the Arabs of Palestine as squatters on ...”

“... it might be a clothesline, ‘old and dark grey’: ‘It had burst open and was giving up its white pith.’ Or it might be a locker room, where ‘hair pieces like Skye terriers waited for their masters’; or a courtroom, where a lawyer called Cannibal Pinsker has ‘a large yellow cravat that lay on his shirt like a cheese omelette’; or an old ...”

“... to her when she read it in A Passage to India. She had started out as a missionary among the white savages of Britain, and by the Twenties and Thirties had come to see herself as another version of Forster’s Mrs Moore. Like Mrs Moore, she possessed a ‘double vision’, which in her case reflected the dual provenance of the Fabian Society – its ...”

“... A first attempt to create an NHS came in 1944, with the publication of a woolly and confusing White Paper. GPs, for example, were to be employed, probably on a salaried basis, by a Central Medical Board. The British Medical Association concluded that this was ‘the thin end of the wedge of a form of service to which it is overwhelmingly opposed – a ...”