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“... travels in America in 1831, the other a picaresque romance about an Englishman called John Larrit (known as Parrot for his talent as a mimic) who is suddenly and brutally torn from an idyllic childhood as the son of an itinerant printer in late 18th-century Devon and transported to Australia, where he grows up to become a topographical artist and ...”

“... Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed ...”

“... hugely important to him, however, and when the family moved to Dublin in 1905 he attended the Christian Brothers’ ‘O’Connell School’, the nursery of several other revolutionaries. His brothers joined the British Army, his parents remained opposed to Sinn Fein, and at the time of the Easter Rising O’Malley himself was enrolled (on a prestigious ...”

“... come hell or high water, let our distinctive British identity be lost in a federal Europe.’ John Major’s ringing assurance to last year’s Conservative Party Conference is part of a long tradition whereby Britishness has been defined primarily by reference to a real or an imaginary Other. Understandably so, since defining this entity in its own terms ...”

“... barn-like structure, set – in 1952 at least – in several acres of woodland. Water Music by John Cage, a Californian composer whose recent work had been feted in New York, opened the programme and baffled its audience. It involved Tudor performing various actions at seemingly random intervals: blowing a duck-call, tuning a radio, shuffling and dealing ...”

“... taken. Then the Troubles flared up again; and the IRA bombing campaign came to the mainland; and John McGrath wrote The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil; and suddenly it was 1974, and there were two close-run general elections, and not only did the Ulster Unionists matter even in England, but so did a couple of hitherto obscure and eccentric ...”

“... For Serbs, they begin in Kosovo or in Bosnia where Serbia is trying to defend civilised Christian Europe against the encroachments of this Other. For the Croats, the Balkans begin in Orthodox, despotic and Byzantine Serbia, against which Croatia safeguards Western democratic values. For many Italians and Austrians, they begin in Slovenia, the ...”

“... bishop Behaine, ‘a single-minded, devoted, hard-working, early imperialist’, dreaming of a Christian empire in the Far East. Up-to-date forts and arsenals were constructed under French direction, war ships and cannon supplied. It must have been the first decisive impact of fire-power on warfare in Indochina, in 1802, the Nguyen dynasty returned to the ...”

“... of the Times, Nevile Henderson, ambassador to Germany, and Philip Kerr, the Marquess of Lothian, a Christian Scientist like Nancy, and one of several to express the view that in marching into the Rhineland, Germany was merely walking into its own backyard. Nancy and Waldorf also regularly entertained Neville Chamberlain. ‘Back from Cliveden. Lord! What a ...”

“... Nazis, as was the case in most branches of the federal bureaucracy. Its first president, Otto John, had been active in the resistance, escaping to London after the failed putsch of 1944. In 1954 he popped up in East Berlin and revealed in a press conference that the soon-to-be West German Ministry of Defence and the foreign intelligence service that was ...”

“... by about 20 per cent. However, where the national movements were concerned, the PMAC, itself a Christian Amharic élite like the regime it superseded, stuck to the old imperial line. Along the northern marches of the empire, between the Sudanese frontier and the Red Sea coast, the revolutionaries were confronted by one of Selassie’s most intractable ...”

“... myth. There is a poignancy of premonition in these words of 1927, the year in which Eliot became a Christian and an Englishman. You can hear it in the unenvious longing for composure in this man who was by no means merely discomposed but who did shudder at such a possibility: ‘Here and there is an anecdote, but all anecdotes of Spinoza are essentially the ...”

“... perdition were a divine’s one opportunity, ‘in a harsh hierarchical society’, to proclaim Christian equality. For his humbler listeners they were, likewise, the sole chance to hear equality proclaimed. A man could be imprisoned in France for marrying above his degree, even though the Church sanctioned any marriage by mutual consent. There is force in ...”

“... for his actions: Liberation justice, too, should have no truck with anonymity. Teitgen, the Christian Democrat Minister of Justice, for instance, boasted that he had purged more people than the sea-green incorruptible himself. The analogy with the Terror was, of course, seized on by critics of the purge. ‘The criminal courtroom,’ one critic ...”

“... drainage. It suggested the basis, safe and unexceptionable because it was historically rooted in Christian ethics, on which a workable social structure could be raised. Hence, for example, the chivalric tone of the Christian Socialist movement, and, half a century later, Baden-Powell’s wholesale adoption of chivalric ...”