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“... it has been assaulted and is championed only by a few. The oak leaf reappears in a wreath on the Iron Cross, the medal for courage in battle introduced during the final struggle against Napoleon in 1813, and, much later, on the first coins issued in West Germany. For​ extreme nationalists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Germany’s roots in the ...”

“... the dumbing down of civilisation in a levelled-out ‘mass society’. On both sides of the Iron Curtain, a proliferation of etiquette books emphasised the importance of civility and moderation, in contrast to the fascist values propagated before 1945.Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Betts’s book is the attention he pays to the reconstitution of ...”

“... shall all be a lot wiser – and sadder too, quite likely. Either we shall have found out that the Iron Lady is impregnable or she herself will have been found out. Margaret Thatcher is the favourite politician of those who like an exciting life. Her maxim in politics – she has claimed it as Thatche’s Law – is that the unexpected always ...”

“... slaughter meted out by uncaring landowners that eventually provoked outrage. The victims of the ‘iron wolf’, as Richard Jeffries called it, included not only poachers but maidservants, clergymen, courting couples, botanisers and bird-nesting boys as well as members of the owner’s family and his absent-minded ...”

“... masochistic fantasies, puts Glenn Gould on his CD player, and gets ready to hang himself from an iron hook in the central beam of his cottage, or almost hang himself – well, just enough to give himself ‘that big, blank, hot-mouthing, hair-lifting, sexy, sexy fear that he only ever met at times like this’. Must I read this? ‘You must know ...”

“... version of hi-tech, just as the needs of the 1852 Palm House (Decimus Burton, ironwork by Richard Turner) were well served by advanced cast-iron technology. In both cases, aesthetic predilections are appropriate to practical needs. The larger, more stolid Temperate House (mainly 1859-62), also by Burton, is larger ...”

“... the civil decencies of Movement verse and identification with what he elsewhere terms “the iron blood of Calvin” make him a Thatcherite before Thatcher.’ Ah, reaction: and iron blood – of course, iron maiden: if that’s not cogency, I’d like to know what is. Paulin’s ...”

“... to life, unusual in a man in his late forties. The hero of After My Fashion is a self-portrait. Richard Storm has returned to Sussex from Paris, where he has made a name for himself with his critical appreciations of modern French writers. The first man he meets is a young painter, Robert Canyot, a traditionalist who thinks ...”

“... the Modernist text. For Blatty, the extreme degree of metaphysical licence is kept in check by the iron hand of a traditional narrative strategy. It is actually very well done, if you submit yourself willingly to this kind of manipulative grasp. But what has been lost is any sense that the writer is more than an accomplished technician, for whom even Lucifer ...”

“... different from that of one’s childhood: the familiar story was successfully told by Richard Hoggart thirty years ago, and it was a recurring topic of Raymond Williams’s. But their tales of privation, upward mobility and cultural contrast were very mild compared with Glasser’s. The poverty from which he emerged was far more disastrous and ...”

“... he doesn’t remember anyone named Persius. The Man who Met Himself (1919) by Donovan Bayley    Richard Panton falls down the stairs and is separated from his subliminal self, which takes the form of a midget. With this loss, Panton himself shrinks and becomes an identical midget. They argue. The midget Panton beats the subliminal midget to death and ...”

“... His family had been established in Norfolk since the late 14th century; his father, Sir Richard, was a cloth merchant (or mercer), who had thrived first on the patronage of Cardinal Wolsey and then of Thomas Cromwell, and had been knighted for his success in procuring foreign loans. Richard even had the nerve to ...”

“... message. Violence was also essential. The Legion’s paramilitary branch, appropriately called the Iron Guard, was responsible for several assassinations in the 1930s. The government answered in kind, arranging for the murder of the Iron Guard’s early leaders. But far from weakening the Legion’s influence, the mixture of ...”

“... Odenigbo; Olanna, rich and beautiful, who is Odenigbo’s girlfriend, and later his wife; and Richard, a white Englishman and Olanna’s sister’s lover. It spans the decade to the end of the Biafran war of 1967-70, in which more than a million people died. Its focus is the impact of the war on these characters and the characters they interact with. The ...”

“... many of the striving, corrupt, developing nations trying to make up for time lost behind the Iron Curtain. Something other than this was expected. The nation that bore the horrors of the Khmer Rouge seemed ready for a kinder if not a more prosperous transformation. This is the country that fought one of the most savage civil conflicts spawned by the Cold ...”