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“... for Aston, Birmingham issued the following leaflet: £5 Reward! DESPERATE TORIES WILD LIE. Mr John Strachey writes: ‘It has come to my notice that Tory canvassers are making the outrageous statement that I am a foreigner. This is a most serious allegation which the Aston Tory Party, utterly beaten in political argument, has fallen back upon as a last ...”

“... of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi Stephen Wise addressing an anti-Nazi rally; John Galsworthy’s protest about planes being used for war – ‘For the love of the sun, and stars and the blue sky, that have given us all our aspirations since the beginning of time, let us leave the air to innocence!’ ‘The guiding principle,’ says ...”

“... critics, the only decent fiction to come out of the American West – actually came out of Oxted, Surrey? Perhaps nostalgia sharpens the sense of place (obviously it does), or perhaps quiddity is not essential to good fiction. Certainly it doesn’t figure largely in the fiction of James himself, of which it might be said, along with Gertrude Stein on the ...”

“... or less for City workers, not to mention Essex men and girls. After monarchs, ranging from King John, whose hunting lodge was at Writtle, to Henry VIII, who built New Hall at Boreham (still standing), came Elizabethan lord chancellors (one is buried at Saffron Walden, another at Felsted) and Georgian lord mayors and City luminaries (too many to list). Their ...”

“... saw as ‘dull and heavy’, Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more ...”

“... in the dock denies dishonestly handling the video: he says he got it in the pub off a man called John. ‘John who?’ asks prosecuting counsel. ‘Dunno,’ says the accused. ‘How long have you known him?’ says counsel. ‘Oh, we’ve drunk together for years,’ says the accused. ‘And you don’t know his ...”

“... is now in the library founded by a rather more public-spirited buccaneer of book collecting, John Pierpont Morgan). Paul Meyer’s career was a model of all that is best in academic rigour; he later helped analyse the documents which led to the acquittal of Alfred Dreyfus. The History of William Marshal contains nearly twenty thousand lines of ...”

“... to the gateway with its heraldic bull’s head, so discouraging to the female students. Dudley St John Magnus also lives in Canada, but he was born in Surrey and claims to have lived as a bagman in Australia in the Thirties. The narrator of his semi-autobiographical novel, Hanabeke, is called Morton Montgomery de Ruthwell ...”

“... be printed beautifully and I’ll sign them all. They’ll be put into portfolios and be sold. John Loker and I got drunk in Ireland last summer and he and I and Nicky Watts decided to bicycle from Land’s End to John O’Groats this summer. I had not ridden a bike since I was a schoolboy, but they were pretty fit. So I ...”

“... something rather different about the Spring Gardens, as they were originally known, at Vauxhall. John Evelyn, an early visitor, described the site in July 1661 as ‘a pretty contriv’d plantation’. The trees there were said to be a hundred years old in 1661. The gardens offered ‘a universal withdrawing room for the city’, as Borg and Coke put it, the ...”

“... in the mid-1930s. She was also his mistress, maintaining a London flat but staying at his house in Surrey whenever his wife, Margaret, was (as she often was) in Wales. Neither Stevenson nor Lloyd George was entirely faithful: he had a notorious roving eye and she a serious relationship with Colonel Thomas Tweed, a political associate of Lloyd George’s, in ...”

“... was nothing to worry about – rest, some pills, and everything would be fine. The hospital was in Surrey, on a hill. It had been founded as a private institution for the well-off, and became part of the National Health Service after the war. The man who endowed it in the 19th century had made a fortune out of patent medicines – liver pills and pills for ...”

“... of expression’. Now English poetry, dormant since Chaucer and Lydgate, got to its feet and sang. John Leland, a friend of Wyatt’s youth, later wrote: ‘The English tongue was rude, its verses vile/Now, skilful Wyatt, it has known your file.’ The only blot on Wyatt’s record was his marriage to the daughter of a Kentish baron, Elizabeth Brooke. We do ...”

“... the programme-makers approached Sir Michael Grylls, long-standing Tory MP for North-West Surrey, and introduced themselves as agents for a firm which wanted to smuggle art treasures out of Russia. As a cover for their enterprise, they explained, they wanted to buy a government agency, preferably the Insolvency Agency, which was then part of the ...”

“... and finding one’s balance, and then wondering if one has really grasped the thing after all. John Donne’s poems in particular are extremely unstable. Critics have often got into a sweat about the way that they argue implausible cases, and very often, too, things happen in the course of them which make it quite clear that while the speaker is busily ...”