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“... around Dover being turned into lorry parks. And I admire those in all parts of what I still hope will remain the United Kingdom who have at least tried to speak from a different and more constructive script.But my hope for the next few years is simple. I suspect that not much can be done about the Billy Bunter ...”

“... few weeks Brik wins his ‘Susie money’. Flowers, wine and dancing, then sitting by the phone in hope: no wonder Brik blurts out ‘I love you!’ when he hears the good news; he’s so happy he says it to her husband. And, pace Larkin, somewhere – Moldova as it happens – this all becomes rain: ‘The Susie grant required no specific itinerary or ...”

“... word ‘last’ in their titles, as with Bulwer-Lytton’s Harold, the Last of the Saxon Kings, Charles Kingsley’s Hereward, the Last of the English and Hebe Weenolsen’s The Last Englishman. Henry Treece broke ranks by calling his Hereward novel Man with a Sword, but Julian Rathbone latterly re-established the pattern with his novel The Last English ...”

“... only those writers who rate more than two lines in Overy’s index – of the Eugenics Society’s Charles Blacker, of Vera Brittain, Cyril Burt, G.D.H Cole, Leonard Darwin, G. Lowes Dickinson, E.M. Forster, Edward Glover, J.A. Hobson, Aldous and Julian Huxley, Storm Jameson, Ernest Jones, Sir Arthur Keith, Maynard Keynes, Archbishop Cosmo Lang, Basil Liddell ...”

“... Gregory Sallust, whose looks and personality were inspired by Tombe), an admiring biography of Charles II, melodramatic science fiction in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs, ‘Crime Dossiers’, in which a whodunnit is packaged with manufactured clues – a hair in a cellophane wrapper, a spent match from a hotel. In this prodigal context, Wheatley’s ...”

“... to have come through the school in recent years, has described a visit to White Lodge by Prince Charles while she was a pupil there, during which security dogs, nosing around in advance of the royal party, sniffed out her stash of forbidden chocolate. But there are other stories. Classical dance is fixated on youth, on yet to be fulfilled promise; it ...”

“... first of all accepting it.’ This should give pause to those in the post-Communist world who hope that some kind of simple restoration of the old pre-Communist regimes might still be possible, that the heritage of Communism can simply be put in brackets. In France, the Revolutionary tradition died a slow, agonising death between 1789 and 1871, and when ...”

“... more radical view forward in the 1981 book Genes, Minds and Culture, in which he and his co-author Charles Lumsden tried to trace the influence of genes on human thought and culture as well as on basic human behaviour. Genes, Minds and Culture does not shrink from making bold assertions. It contains, for example, a series of elaborate mathematical equations ...”

“... on Hobson’s Imperial race. London, the heart of the Empire, as Hobson’s fellow new liberal, Charles Masterman, declared in The Condition of England (1909), was inhabited by that ‘homogeneous substance: the City Dweller’. This creature had strange crowd propensities which were a source of irresolvable mysteries and riddles. Moreover, ‘it is in the ...”

“... between them still persists, and in Nairobi they begin to come together again, this time with the hope of a child at last. It is easy to see that this is a novel on entirely traditional lines. A young woman confronts her destiny, with little to help her but courage and persistence – like any heroine of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot or Henry James. She ...”

“... night,’ so he tells Arthur, his older son. ‘Maybe one day you’ll have one like it too. I hope you will.’ Arthur nods curtly, more pained than embarrassed. He can’t bear born-again Christians: they don’t even believe the revelations of Charles Darwin. Arthur was out with his girl while Robbie was in his agony ...”

“... this fine biography. Mary Kingsley was the daughter of George Kingsley, the younger brother of Charles. The DNB gallantly falsifies the date of George’s marriage, which was only four days before Mary’s birth. His wife (thought to have been his cook) was a competent businesswoman and, unexpectedly, a good shot with a revolver. Mary learned from her the ...”

“... spend the war years as Connolly’s live-in lover, organiser and helpmeet, living in perpetual hope that Connolly would divorce his American wife, Jean, which he didn’t. Eventually Jean died, but by then Connolly was in love with Barbara Skelton, and Lys was a nervous wreck from having been, as she put it, ‘played around with so much’.Was Lys ever so ...”

“... the cod fishery on the Grand Banks has been devastating to these townships. Some cling on in the hope that cod will make a comeback as a result of the fishing moratorium which has been in force since 1990. But they still haven’t, unlike the North Sea cod, which returned in 1919 after four years’ disruption to fishing caused by submarine warfare. Nature ...”

“... the puritan tradition. This study by Sheila Kirk and the equally thoughtful photographs by Martin Charles that go with it at last set out the full evidence on which this claim can rest. Webb was 18 and embarking on an obscure apprenticeship in Reading when The Seven Lamps of Architecture came out in 1849. By the time he met Ruskin seven years later, he was a ...”