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“... outset, like some grotesque über-car the great white must perpetually keep moving. My sister then held up as evidence The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, in which Marinetti, declaring in 1909 that ‘time and space died yesterday’, describes driving his car so fast that it spins out and overturns. She noted that Marinetti repeatedly calls the vehicle a ...”

“... book spawned a new genre of British travel-writing, nicely described as ‘motoring pastoral’ by David Matless in Landscape and Englishness (1998). Motoring is imbued with an almost celestial quality in this very British yoking together of nostalgia and modernity, as if the car, for those with the means to own one, had opened up a gateway to ...”

“... to the British after the war, he stayed on as a ‘native accounts clerk’ – a post he held for the rest of his working life. He retired to Nyasaland in 1943 and died in 1945. I know all this because Mdala, writing mostly from the town of Tukuyu in the Rungwe district of Tanganyika, kept up a voluminous correspondence (all type-written) from the ...”

“... pound standards.) The guns won the day. The weather did the rest.After the battle, Medina Sidonia held a council of war on his battered, blood-stained flagship. His surviving officers agreed to turn about and fight again. But on 10 August he decided to cut and run: ‘a dreadful decision’, noted his deputy, Juan Martínez de Recalde, whose papers were ...”

“... did not long survive her son’s birth, and soon afterwards Ms Woolvine met and married David McCluskie, a plasterer and bricklayer. Terry took McCluskie’s name, though this was never regularised. The family moved to London after the strike at Cammell-Laird, when David McCluskie was finding work hard to come ...”

“... Neil Kinnock, he will have recalled with a shudder the 51st Annual Conference of the Labour Party, held just up the coast at Morecambe in 1952. The young Jim Callaghan spoke twice on that occasion, first against the denationalisation of road haulage by Mr Churchill’s Cabinet and then in a sharp attack on the hypocrisy of the Bevanites, who had swept to ...”

“... uniformly laudatory. This was not easy in the face of critics as formidable as Winston Churchill, David Lloyd George and Basil Liddell Hart, and by the beginning of World War Two the attempts to defend him were looking increasingly threadbare. The publication of Haig’s Diaries after the war (unkindly described by Lord Beaverbrook as committing suicide after ...”

“... for monumental mockery (‘This England’), the obituary which said plummily: ‘Any sketch of David Glass’s work would be incomplete without reference to his amour propre, the history of his subject.’ Over in America, I miss the Times obituaries more than anything else from the English public prints. The USA has no counterpart. The New York Times ...”

“... preoccupations and tastes. In her straining after the essence of things, she reminds one of David Malouf and of Bruce Chatwin (who married into her clan). I don’t mean that she copies them: she is too committed, too intense for that; an element of what an American reviewer called ‘self-administered therapy’ convinces one that she is too seriously ...”

“... on by the medical profession, set out to curb the tobacco industry. They were Kenneth Robinson and David Owen (Labour) and Sir George Young (Tory). All three were routed. The hardest fighter of the three was Sir George Young. His determination to cut down, for instance, on tobacco’s sponsorship of sports made him unpopular in those parts of the Tory Party ...”

“... the Socialist Unity (i.e. Communist) Party supported Labour. That accord, and the fact that it held, owes a lot to the personality and strengths of David Lange: but if the Left had split, as it has split here between socialists and SDP, we would have had yet another term of the execrable Muldoon and the yes-men he ...”

“... habits of electoral behaviour. When the first elections in the German Federal Republic were held in 1949, it was discovered that patterns of support for Christian, conservative and socialist parties mirrored almost exactly the voting patterns of the last free elections before Hitler. In Italy, despite political instability and an electoral system ...”

“... in the privacy of their own apartments. There were no Saudis at the farewell party the Arnots held for Tim Hayter, a New Zealand diver and Penny Arnot’s lover, at their flat on the sixth floor of a Jeddah apartment block in May 1979. There were no other women, except for Helen Smith, a 23-year-old nurse from Yorkshire who worked in the same private ...”

“... their grievances against the Ayatollah, and at least an element of tit-for-tat over the Americans held hostage in Tehran – became known, so the by now almost routine siege manoeuvres got into gear. Police negotiators arrived to set up the field telephone that was to be the terrorists’ one contact with the outside world; the press assembled, bringing with ...”

“... more time to accumulate form. The three men whom he followed – Kenneth Clarke, Kenneth Baker and David Waddington – together occupied the post for just a few months more than he has already served. Baker’s brief romp managed to produce two absurdities, the first comic in the form of the Dangerous Dogs Act, the second tragic, in the form of his refusal to ...”