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“... a watery division was astonishing to me. When I was very small we went to Belgium and drove to Holland one day. I couldn’t credit the unreality of it. It was the sea that said a country was a country, not an official checking passports at a border. And where were we, I wanted to know, when the car was half-way across the line dividing Belgium and ...”

“... Rybczynski deplores the damage done by the ‘socialist post-war governments in England, Germany, Holland and the Scandinavian countries’ which responded favourably to the ‘left-leaning rhetoric of the Modern school’. But before this momentary engagement with the question of public housing disrupts his art-historical survey, he quickly jumps back into ...”

“... shorts were long and baggy, and goalies usually wore cloth caps.’ Such great pros as Tom Finney and Jimmy Dickinson remained in aura (and even in income) supremely talented artisans. Greyhound racing and speedway enjoyed their brief heydays, and as Paul Addison observes, these were also sports ‘with a strongly working-class character. Their ...”

“... and the will, as Chesterton pointed out, means nothing if not the willingness to give things up. Tom Moore sang for his supper until there was nothing left of him, but it was not the fault of Holland House, which could be walked away from, as Byron proved. There is a crushing sort of determinism which tries to make social ...”

“... again and is now revealed not as Anne Frank but as a survivor nevertheless, only from Norway not Holland. I had been reading this when we go into EAT on Madison and 81st for a cup of tea and a piece of (very unsatisfactory) coconut cake. An oldish woman in a red coat and beret (and looking not unlike how Enid Starkie used to look) beckons me over, having ...”

“... people’s successes, on occasion tempted to annex them – 15th-century Italy or 17th-century Holland – by force of arms, in vain forays to offset the peasant stillness at home.This is a memorable description. But what were the causes of the web of inertias that made up this French identity? Braudel has rather little to say about them. The luxuriant ...”

“... gas.The next day we zipped south on a motorway, Moby on the CD player, huge container trucks from Holland and Germany careening by in the rain. Coffee in Albert, a quick gander in the drizzle at the French war memorial in the town square, then on to the giant Lutyens monument to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. It was mid-morning, and we were the only ...”

“... rise in the 1980s. ‘Shannon has been kind of an inspiration for Chinese leaders since then,’ Tom Kelleher, a near fifty-year veteran of Shannon Free Zone and its spin-out consultancies, told me. ‘The Chinese embassy in London was constantly bringing guys to Shannon, it was a kind of Lourdes to them. Visit Shannon and you get an indulgence.’ Among the ...”