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“... opinion. At the same time, no real effort was made to readjust the levels of either Scottish or Welsh representation at Westminster, on which the Labour Party increasingly depends, or to renegotiate the formula by which Scotland receives substantial financial benefits from Westminster, beyond anything enjoyed by the other parts of the Union. As King ...”

“... Bunter’s to run headlong into things, with preposterously beneficial results for all concerned. David Hughes, in his latest novel, takes this trait and turns it on its head: the outcome of Bunter’s intervention in certain notable episodes of the 20th century is very serious indeed. By this account, Bunter is personally responsible for the arrest of ...”

“... David Jones was staying in the Chelsea flat of the BBC’s Assistant Director of Programme Planning, Harman Grisewood, as the bombs fell on London in the autumn of 1940. During one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported ...”

“... and how he keeps coming back. T.S. Eliot said he was guilty of ‘crimes against taste’. David Lodge made him a twee subject of nostalgic research for the English hero of Small World, Philip Swallow, hopelessly outgunned by the vulgar but irresistible American, Morris Zapp. Lodge had got his significant detail wrong – Swallow should be a scholar of ...”

“... On the one hand, the American colonists (who were themselves a medley of Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and Germans) might never have won had they not secured aid and auxiliaries from the French, Spanish and Dutch empires. Conversely, British troops (who were also a medley of Scots, Irish, English, Welsh and Germans) fought ...”

“... sitting for a rural seat, he was a passionate nationalist (he often addressed meetings in Welsh) whose main concern was to free Nonconformists from having to pay tithes for the support of the Anglican Church. In his mind the Anglican land-owning class in Wales was an exact equivalent of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. Yet, as Hattersley ...”

“... Queen Incog’ in this rough and tumble burlesque, and according to her first biographer David Baker, who wrote eight years after her death in 1756, she ‘appears to have had a relation of close literary intimacy’ with the feckless Hatchett. But that’s as warm as the paternity trail ever gets. It doesn’t help, as Baker also recorded, that ...”

“... regret to Kinnock himself. There have, on the other hand, been some substantial successes. The ‘Welsh windbag’ label, though containing a large grain of truth, is by no means the whole truth. Kinnock has much improved the Party’s policy-making apparatus, streamlined its campaign machine, and made a stab at dragging its image into the second half of the ...”

“... The Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones, known for his three-volume hagiography of Freud, was also the author of a book on figure skating. The New York Psychoanalytic Institute owns a dusty copy, which is illustrated with drawings of the elegant squiggles skaters were supposed to leave on the ice: ‘Only in a certain type of dream,’ Jones wrote, offering a clue to his other area of expertise, ‘do we ever else attain a higher degree of the same ravishing experience of exultantly skiing the earth ...”

“... German invasion and thereby gather useful information, but in the event not much was achieved. As David Abulafia put it, if ‘he was something more than a professor of Byzantine studies … it would be absurd to cast him in the role of James Bond.’ In truth the war was enormously useful to him, allowing him to pursue his research. Afterwards he went to run ...”

“... as ‘an unspeakable blackguard’, who told his wife that St Donat’s Castle, his recent Welsh purchase, was Norman. ‘Norman who?’ she replied, wondering. There was William Waldorf Astor, who was so anxious to hear his praises sung in the press that he instructed his office to release the false news of his death so he might enjoy his ...”

“... prospects first. As a politician, his searing assaults on the Liberals’ Education, Licensing and Welsh Church Disestablishment Bills, as well as on the People’s Budget and House of Lords reform, were too forced and frenzied to convince: clever advocacy rather than expressions of deeply-held belief. He helped to shout down Asquith in the Commons in ...”

“... fulfilled and terminated. That cured me for good. So now I admire climbing from a distance. As David Craig effectively demonstrates in Native Stones, however, it is an activity best understood from close up. Much of its delight and terror is almost microscopic in source. Non-climbers may associate the sport with acrophobic spaces, alp on alp arising, but ...”

“... their doubts about the desirability and viability of such a strategy. One of the many virtues of David Armitage’s Ideological Origins of the British Empire is that its author is markedly transatlantic in background, and consequently able to understand and mediate between these very different intellectual sensibilities and scepticisms. Trained at Princeton ...”

“... Party up and down the country, there was no way which the professors of Belgrano Studies, as David Frost has christened us, could have carried on. Many a crusade has been smothered by the great big yawn of the British public. Norton-Taylor is not and never was Tam Dalyell’s or anyone else’s tame journalist. On the contrary, he started by being ...”