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“... thus a belief in the continued viability of the pits – to function at all. Francis Beckett and David Hencke quote one journalist’s description of a mining village near Barnsley: The village is not big, nearly all the 300 workers in the pit live here with their families. The wages were never very high … but they have cars and many own their little ...”

“... John Donne, and was seized upon by a readership anxious to stress the degeneracy of their own age. David Jones, an autochthonous Welsh, rather than Anglo-American, modernist of Poundian tendencies, offers another poet’s version of Johnson’s aperçu in his preface to the Anathemata (1952), and claims the Metaphysicals for ...”

“... countryside, of secretive old men who catch rats and play crib, of the speakers of Gaelic or Welsh (he is good at Welsh), of the Friends of the Refreshment Room on Platform 3 at Soup Hales, of Bradford’s iron-watch-chained, grim-booted Alderman Foodbotham, Permanent Chairman of Tramways and the Fine Arts, and of ...”

“... from scrappy British memories that they had had a champion against the Saxons, and some ingenious Welsh bishops who, furious at the unholy alliance of Anglo-Saxon and Norman Johnny-come-latelies, consolidated their prestige and estates against the interlopers by inventing evangelistic exploits for ancient saints like Dyfrig or ...”

“... trail-beating throws up a host of names, some of them forgotten: Douglas Goldring, Leslie Welsh, Edward Shanks, J.D. Beresford, Ethel Carnie, Patrick Hamilton, Alick West, H.R. Barbor, Miles Malleson. To Lucas, these writers differed from the more self-regarding literati in their search for ‘a little-told story: a story not of despair, but of ...”

“... department. These events provide the backdrop for the fictional incidents recounted in The Forger. David Halifax, the protagonist and narrator, is an artist who arrives in Paris in 1939, at the age of 21, after he has been awarded a scholarship by a mysterious body, known only as the Levasseur Committee. The Committee handles his boarding fees and pays for ...”

“... Ivor Bulmer-Thomas and Lord Chalfont, he points out, also speak English with hardly a trace of a Welsh accent; and he wonders if there is something in the air or water of the Eastern Valley of Monmouthshire that washes away deviations from standard English. The answer is that it has nothing to do with air or water, and that accent is only part of the ...”

“... any party, including the Labour Party of Tony Blair and the Conservative Party of Blair’s heir, David Cameron. Glasman has no fundamental problem with Cameron’s notion of the Big Society, which he takes very seriously. He absolutely is not one of those who think it’s just a fluffy cover story for an ideological programme of radical Tory cuts (which is ...”

“... of the 1984-85 strike he co-edited, Raphael Samuel claimed that over decades the Scottish and Welsh coalfields produced men with their ‘own distinctive version of militancy – more “educated”, more communist, more statesman-like’ than their English counterparts. One possible expression of this trend was the formation in 1973 of the South Wales ...”

“... to the state far more than it did to the people, who remained, for the most part, firmly Scots, Welsh, Irish or English. From this point of view, one of Colley’s central arguments seems correct: as the religious and imperial justifications for having a powerful British state have faded away, what more natural than for the component pieces of the UK to ...”

“... Fleming’s history is Volume II in the Penguin History of Britain, for which the general editor, David Cannadine, ‘laid down three inviolable rules’: no footnotes, no historiography (that is, no discussion of the ebb and flow of historical opinion), and make it accessible to everyone, general readers, students and professional historians alike (in other ...”

“... and callous murder’ of Hilda Murrell, to use the words of Chief Detective Superintendent David Cole, are complex. So complex that, I am told, the Police have taken some forty thousand or more records, of which over fourteen thousand have been computerised. The death of the 78-year-old Shrewsbury rose-grower is, I understand, the subject of the ...”

“... style from the essentially provincial Williams. The railway signalman’s son from Pandy, on the Welsh side of the Welsh border, became a political activist at 14, in 1935, when Michael Foot, just down from Oxford, was his local Labour candidate – though the young Williams privately thought Foot too Oxford Union for ...”

“... Excalibur perhaps, links up the parts of the novel and is symbolic in its action. A Welshman, David Jones, runs away to sea, survives the sinking of the Titanic, becomes a cook in New York, marries Ludmilla, the daughter of his Russian employer, returns to Wales and the First World War. He is in Ireland during the Rebellion and, because he is posted as ...”

“... effort to enlist Legge in the brother and sisterhood of the Scottish New Wave (Warner, Galloway, Welsh) by crediting him with the subtlety of Chekhov. Subtlety is the last thing McLean should have claimed for him. Legge tells his anecdotes in a sort of blustering, buttonholing voice – a version of the many Legge (and Kelman) characters who spend hours ...”