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“... wants to get on,’ the SNP’s Winnie Ewing announced after her shock victory in the 1967 Hamilton by-election, which sent the British government into a panic about the hitherto unthreateningly eccentric force of Scottish nationalism. Labour was split: should Scotland get an ‘Assembly’, voting for its own programmes? Or would Scots find peace ...”

“... are not, even if someone who is clearly Shuggie puts in a cameo appearance, asking Mungo Hamilton for advice outside a pawnbroker’s. (The boys are of an age: Shuggie is sixteen at the end of Shuggie Bain, Mungo fifteen during the events of Young Mungo.) Awkward, angular, posh-sounding, black-haired youths wanting to sell their mother’s ...”

“... cultural and philosophic life lasted for a hundred years to the death of Scott and left its mark on Europe and America. An ancient city, a capital, with authors of all kinds, from Gavin Douglas to James Boswell to Annie S. Swan, Sir Compton Mackenzie and a thousand others: the subject is God’s own gift to the sifter of anecdotes and the historian of ...”

“... friend, Alois Hirt, on artists in Rome in 1787 might have been quoted, notably those on Gavin Hamilton. Among the travellers recorded in the Dictionary are 310 artists – painters, sculptors, architects, gem-carvers and engravers – from the Adam brothers to Wright of Derby. In Britain as elsewhere in Northern Europe and, indeed, in the states of ...”

“... An unclutter that trumps the occasional temptation to clutter.Writing in these pages long ago, Ian Hamilton took mocking issue with something Heaney said to another interviewer: ‘About the only enmity I have is towards pride.’* But it’s the simple truth. When you think of Yeats’s ‘Cast a cold Eye/On Life, on Death./Horseman, pass by!’ or Rilke’s ...”

“... and Prince Arthur the equivalent of a raddler, the dauber who paints the ram so that it leaves a mark when it has served the sheep. Raddle Prince Arthur and it would have settled whether the prince had successfully slept with Catherine, there would have been no marriage for Henry VIII, thus no divorce and no Reformation.29 May, Yorkshire. I’ve lost count ...”

“... now. I must have lunch – found a big slug in my lettuce recently!In an interview with Ian Hamilton in 1964 Larkin expressed annoyance with reviewers of his work who complained that there was something ‘uniquely dreary’ about the experiences depicted in his poems. ‘I’d like to know how all these romantic reviewers spend their time – do they ...”

“... he decided to go to the Slade, as John had done. There he knocked around with Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and Edward Wadsworth in the Slade Coster Gang. They went to music halls, held parties with naked dancing girls and got into fights on Tottenham Court Road. It was a remarkable time at the Slade – his other classmates included Paul Nash, Ben ...”

“... of empire who collected. Some of the century’s greatest hoarders, from Horace Walpole to William Hamilton, had only a slight association with empire. But the collections of the Poliers and the Clives were filled not only with the traditional European decorative objects, from furniture to paintings, with which every well-to-do European home had to be ...”

“... among others, while working as an analyst for the CIA, the NSA and the security outfit Booz Allen Hamilton (whose present vice chairman, Mike McConnell, is a former director of the NSA). Imperialism has been defined as doing abroad what you would like to do at home but can’t. Snowden, from the nature of his work, was made to recognise with growing dismay ...”

“... their hand at Americanisms usually fall flat on their face, but Taylor consistently hits the mark, and his dialogue is especially good. I would hesitate to describe this sort of thing as parody, though, because parody entails measured exaggeration for comic effect. The only response that Taylor’s accuracy calls forth is admiration for the author, and ...”

“... her bed for his rival. (The surname has a noble ring, though it is made up of two things that can mark a grave.) The house is a valuable piece of real estate, worth millions despite its dilapidated condition, and becomes a more mundane motive for murder than anything in Shakespeare. In this reconfigured, chronologically dislocated family drama – the time is ...”

“... major collections to have survived the Victorian bonfire. The series has just reached the halfway mark and will probably be completed around 2020. The Carlyle edition, like the concurrent (but bonfire-reduced) Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in ...”

“... There was no agenda. A cut-and-dried scheme was laid before us by the Chairman [Lord George Hamilton], and we were not asked to vote on it, only to express our opinion on half-a-dozen points ranging from the hour of luncheon to the appointment of assistant commissioners,’ who would conduct any necessary research. However, on 9 January, the diary ...”

“... These hardly weigh up against the loss of a parliamentary salary. Consider the case of Neil Hamilton, who was defeated by Martin Bell after 14 years as an MP. One of his crimes was to have lived it up in the Paris Ritz at Mohamed al-Fayed’s expense. He and his wife, Christine, stayed for six days instead of the expected two or three, ate six expensive ...”