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“... sexy nurses and then put out to dry in the sun, pinned up in shawls. Mr Scobie reads the Bible and William Blake, and then he makes up little riddles. One of them is about dying – but nobody wants to hear about that: it is held to be a tasteless riddle. This is a comedy to make the reader doleful. Don Bloch, an American, writes about hospitals and medicine ...”

“... until the appointed hour for his interview with an old queen in Deal, or with the executed traitor William Joyce’s daughter, by his second wife, in Gillingham. Carry On grotesques, professional alcoholics, poets suffering with their nerves, Broadstairs fascists, economic migrants of every stamp: all the devils are here. From the areal to Ariel, Seabrook ...”

“... mostly misguided and often self-important activities. Whether or not Waldorf Astor’s father, William Waldorf, the first Lord Astor, approved of his son’s marriage to Nancy Shaw – he did not go to the wedding on the grounds of ‘poor health’ – he was not niggardly with his wedding presents. In addition to giving Nancy an invaluable tiara, he ...”

“... Charlie Chaplin, who seems to have been on everyone’s guest list. Lawrence knew John and Susan Buchan, country-house owners of the new weekending sort, and spent his time with them talking about ‘the Arabs … his muddled masochism and his … disillusion’; Baldwin appears at Warwick Castle and at Madresfield, which was in part the model for ...”

“... which have a soft spot for God’s Englishman. Christopher Hill skips lightly over it. John Buchan refers to it as ‘a farmyard jape’ and excuses it on the grounds that ‘this thing touched the heart of his authority and he could permit no weakening.’ Others suggest that the story is probably royalist propaganda (it occurs in Clarendon’s History ...”

“... behind straggly beards and whiskers with sad, rheumy eyes – Matthew Arnold, Carlyle, Swinburne, William Morris, Leslie Stephen, Tennyson – giving off a steamy despair. They had heard the melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith, and they did not like the sound of it. Today relegated to a wall in a side room, these literary men seem to take second billing ...”

“... right to stress his subject’s affinity – especially in his own mind – with the typical Buchan hero. There was always something rather dashing, in an old-fashioned way, in Knight’s approach to security matters. He practised an especial vigilance in the matter of Communist agitation. Reds, Jews and homosexuals were three groups against whom Knight ...”

“... of the particular or the concrete as these things would have been understood by Ezra Pound or William Carlos Williams; they have an occluded quality, or the opacity of calligraphy or inscription (‘that parchment-like face’). Civilisation, history and culture – the Buddha’s head; Benedikt’s severed head – are breakable, degradable and literally ...”

“... better moments,’ remarked Hugh Montague.It’s some help to be English, and brought up on Buchan and Sapper, in appreciating the dread kinship between toffs and crime.Yet this gruff, stupid masculine world is set on its ears by one courtesan. ‘Modene Murphy’, who is Mailer’s greatest failure of characterisation here, is perhaps such a failure ...”

“... reaped a prodigious annual return. H.G. Wells said of one of John Jacob’s great-grandchildren, William Waldorf Astor, that he extracted rents ‘as effectively as a ferret draws blood from a rabbit’, though by Wells’s day spending rather than getting had become the most visible Astor occupation. With an exaggerated version of the anglophilia common to ...”

“... jet airliners, worried about what the Russians were up to, and comforted by the Giles cartoon, the William Hickey column and The Adventures of Rupert Bear. As with most newspapers, the torrent these days has become a trickle – a trickle supervised in the Express’s case by an owner, Richard Desmond, who made a lot of his money from masturbatory aids such as ...”

“... Road had previously been occupied by an American draft-decliner and notorious non-inhaler, William Jefferson Clinton. It’s tempting to compare the parallel careers of these two men, both conservative liberals, advocates of small freedoms. Men of the Sixties. Charismatic hustlers with an eye for a deal. Provincials trading on cracker-barrel ...”

“... style: ‘Her mind was as sharp as any I have known.’ Thus Charles Moore on Shirley Letwin. Buchan is alive and editing the Sunday Telegraph.11 July. An ex-prisoner turns up at the Drop-In Centre in Parkway. He is violent and the Centre telephones Social Services for help, who tell them to send him round. The Centre does so, phoning to say that he’s ...”

“... city during the First World War. ‘The world is gettin’ socialism now like the measles,’ John Buchan’s old Borders radical Andrew Amos says in Mr Standfast (1919), but most people remained unaffected by the epidemic.By 1913, according to T.C. Smout in A Century of the Scottish People 1830-1950, Glasgow made ‘one fifth of the steel, one third of the ...”

“... the remnants of an older order. Galt’s first memory was to do with the religious sect of Mrs Buchan, a local cult of spiritualists who broke from the Kirk and proclaimed knowledge of the New Jerusalem. They were hounded from the town, and a great procession followed them, howling and merrymaking, and jostling the Buchanites on their way. John Knox ...”