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“... unworthy of that name.’ The isolated killing of one small boy explained the condition of Britain; as a result, it didn’t need explaining on its own terms. The Bulger case also served the useful function of helping Blair to come out from the shadow of Gordon Brown. Until that point, Brown had been the dominant member of the partnership (Blair even ...”

“... many years ago, ‘The Triumph of the Word of God in the Life and Literature of John Bunyan’, Ian Paisley praised this ‘dreamer and penman’ for his ‘strong doctrinal’ preaching, his opposition to the civil and ecclesiastical authorities, the enormous crowds he drew, and for his prose style. This ‘poor unschooled tinker’ became, Paisley ...”

“... the centre, on a hill that gives views across the city and down to the river. She and her husband, Ian, didn’t believe Putin would try to conquer all Ukraine; they expected, at worst, a new attack in the Donbas. Half of their friends thought there would be a full-scale invasion. The other half, like them, were in denial. Andrusyk’s first anxiety came on ...”

“... to the popular situation comedy Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? by Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais, aired on BBC television in 1973-74. Thelma (Brigit Forsyth) is the fiancée and subsequently wife of Bob (Rodney Bewes), whose scurrilous childhood friend Terry (James Bolam), returning to civil life after five years in the army, seeks to ...”

“... Baths. The foundation stone was laid on 18 March 1903. The official opening was on 25 June 1904. Ian Gordon and Simon Inglis’s book Great Lengths: The Historic Indoor Swimming Pools of Britain tells us that E.J. Wakeling, vice chairman of the Shoreditch Baths and Washhouses Committee, animated the occasion by plunging ...”

“... at a press conference in Stockholm the week before arriving in London, he’d said: ‘I believe Britain could benefit from a fascist leader.’ Never mind that a degenerate like Bowie would have been one of the first against the wall. When the Daily Express asked him about the remark, he replied: ‘If I said it – and I’ve a terrible feeling I did say ...”

“... with a stairway to heaven. The steps, coincidentally, chime in with a poem by the recently dead Ian Hamilton printed in the LRB. We are on a kind of stair. The world below Will never be regained; was never there Perhaps. And yet it seems We’ve climbed to where we are With diligence, as if told long ago How high the highest rung. 23 January. To ...”

“... leading native historian, B.B. Misra, has written; ‘Indian troops … conquered the country for Britain.’ There is a touch of exaggeration, and anachronism, in the judgment. But it delivers a basic truth. Foreign conquerors were no novelty in the subcontinent, whose northern plains had known successive waves of invaders from the tenth century onwards. For ...”

“... to fill in the spaces. The tone of it reminds me of the tone of Lowell’s conversation with Ian Hamilton from 1971, mechanically clever but distant and deaf, all denatured one-liners and musing rhetorical questions. It’s not conversation but the complacent burble of a radio on a windowsill. History is about as broad as Lowell gets, a custard-pie ...”

“... of legitimacy that mass democratic politics can bestow on successful politicians, particularly in Britain and the United States. Gladstone was, for Weber, ‘the dictator of the electoral battlefield’, and Weber admired the British Parliamentary system precisely for its capacity to produce leaders of this type. Gladstone may have been an ethical ...”

“... find the British approach equally horrifying). America has some natural predators that Britain has not (though both have plenty of cars), but the differences here are chiefly cultural. Nussbaum accepts the received wisdom and practices of her own country and culture, and her attempts to square this with the CA are not convincing. She isn’t wrong ...”

“... utopian and the innovative artist. Whereas the first kind of philosopher (a kind common in Britain and America, and exemplified by even such relatively liberated analytic philosophers as Thomas Nagel and Bernard Williams) contrasts ‘hard scientific fact’ with ‘the subjective’ or with ‘metaphor’, the second kind – common elsewhere in the ...”

“... dull that it nauseated me’. But the imaginative arts lined up to pay tribute. In Cambridge, Ian McEwan and A.S. Byatt spoke about their ‘literary relationship with Darwin’. The joint Yale-Cambridge museum homage, Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science and the Visual Arts (at the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge and the Yale Center for British ...”

“... heroic soldiers and airmen still living. He works out that a million men and a million women in Britain are queer, and turns the tables in one indignant phrase: ‘I sometimes think we homosexuals are absurdly tolerant.’ Frustrated common sense had marked an essay by the married but gay-friendly Edward Hyams in a special issue of the New Statesman in 1960 ...”

“... there were a couple of titles by Ngaio Marsh, a batch of paperbacks by Dennis Wheatley and Ian Fleming and an incomplete, untouched set of Dickens in pale blue cloth bindings. Nobody went near the Dickens – Colin, a reader of contemporary paperbacks only, declared a hatred of him for his infatuation with the poor and his longwindedness. Maureen ...”