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“... king just so that two centuries later it could commune with the spirits of Cecil Rhodes and John Buchan in neo-imperialist seances alongside the set of countries bearing the queen’s head on their coins. But this hasn’t stopped certain Anglosphericals formulating a new mythology of Anglo oneness. In his 2006 book A History of the English-Speaking Peoples ...”

“... was more than outweighed by highly respectable contributions from the likes of Edmund Gosse, Henry James and even John Buchan. Yet many of the illustrations did shock and even revolt, and Lane was to sack Beardsley when the backwash from the Wilde scandal hit the Bodley Head. ‘Wilde!’ wrote Lambert, in one of his few ...”

“... Irish referred to the ‘English’ then rather than the ‘British’, a term favoured by James I but not by his English subjects, who in those days rejected it as firmly as the Scots, Welsh and Irish reject it today.) We can guess what Kipling felt about the founding of the Irish Free State, always referred to by Honor Tracy, herself aggressively ...”

“... English. There are impressive instances which seem to affirm this – notably in the 18th-century James Thomson, author of The Seasons, whom Robert Crawford treats with proper and welcome respect. Does any one seriously maintain that Thomson, a great poet, would have been greater if he had written in ‘the Doric’? In the present century, however, I number ...”

“... everyday life for everybody else. This can come as a shock to even the best-informed citizens. James Carville, the Svengali behind Clinton’s election win in 1992, was so amazed by the power of freely moving capital, viewed at close range, he said that if reincarnation were real, he would like to be born again as the international bond markets. But the ...”

“... V & A and the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. A century later another celebrated London plantsman, James Lee of Hammersmith, was responsible for introducing the young Sydney Parkinson to Joseph Banks. The son of an Edinburgh brewer and a fellow Quaker of Lee’s, Parkinson had begun to demonstrate promise as a flower painter. Banks was on the look-out for such ...”

“... book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.As a child ...”

“... that the land of the giants wasn’t really there. That changed with the voyages of Vitus Bering, James Cook and George Vancouver, who between 1728 and 1794 mapped out most of the west coast of Canada and Alaska. They were looking for a strait and an inland sea supposedly discovered by Juan de Fuca and Bartholomew de Fonte in 1592 and 1640. Unfortunately, the ...”

“... There is no sentimentalism here – well, except perhaps when it comes to considerations of James Laughlin’s almost useless Tzotzil dictionary, or Edward James’s exotic house at Xilitla. The quixotic and semi-aristocratic qualities of people like Wodehouse who are not driven either by ‘the falling rate of ...”

“... was always a storyteller for boys, in the tradition (a very good one) of R.L. Stevenson and John Buchan. In A Sort of Life, which was as near to an autobiography as he was ever prepared to go (and itself the result of psychotherapy for a period of writer’ block), Greene tells how he first came to keep a record of his dreams. Though it’ not at all clear ...”

“... in throughout Mackenzie’s writing career, many from unexpectedly distinguished sources. Henry James may well have been influenced by Mackenzie’s good looks. He had been so swept away by Rupert Brooke’s appearance that it had been quite a relief to be told he was not a very good poet. But about Mackenzie he was rhapsodic, considering him by far the ...”

“... Lewis Grassic Gibbon (the pen-name of James Leslie Mitchell) is put forward as his country’s great 20th-century novelist: the Scottish D.H. Lawrence. Gibbon’s reputation substantially rests on A Scots Quair (‘quire’ – or ‘gathering of sheets’), also called ‘The Mearns Trilogy’, Mearns being an ancient name for Kincardineshire, now itself an ancient name after the county reorganisation of 1975 ...”

“... prose’; he described the major long poem of his later years, ‘In Memoriam James Joyce’, as a ‘ragbag’, a poetic ‘Loch Ness Monster’. But critics are starting to recognise that neither the boasts nor the admissions of defeat are to be read too literally: his poetic task is both ‘impossible and imperative’. Nancy Gish’s ...”

“... be seen as a courteous but firm reproof to those who, like me, brought up on Arthur Machen, John Buchan, Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Henry Treece, not to mention H.P. Lovecraft, got the wrong idea a long time ago and have been reluctant to abandon it. The wrong idea is the ‘widely held belief that the ancient pre-Christian religions of Europe ...”

“... to attend occasional inaugural lectures and dinners which flash one back to the world of John Buchan. I make him a present of one such occasion: as a Rhodes Scholar I was wont to go to the annual Rhodes dinners, loud with the sort of rhetoric which would make Hitchens blench. Traditionally, there had been toasts to the Founder (Rhodes), the Chancellor of ...”