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“... Edinburgh professor’s work had recently prompted Eliot’s celebration of poetry censured by Dr Johnson for having ‘the most heterogeneous ideas ... yoked by violence together’. MacDiarmid’s determination to be ‘whaur extremes meet’ is very much a Modernist priority as well as a Scottish one. This is evident not least in his language, which, like ...”

“... Aristophanes’ – in both cases rather flatteringly – Foote included among his fans Dr Johnson (‘For a broad laugh I must confess the scoundrel has no fellow’) and Edward Gibbon, who told his sister in a letter: ‘When I am tired of the Roman Empire I can laugh away an evening at Foote’s theatre.’ Yet he died, said Garrick, excusing ...”

“... tenderness. Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in 1723, the son of a formidable mother, Margaret Douglas, and a dead customs officer, also named Adam Smith. At the age of 14, he went up to Glasgow University which seems, from Ross’s description, to have been in a tumult of religious zeal, a sort of Calvinist University of Cairo; but there he came under the ...”

“... contends that Reynolds can be aligned with the heroic, noble, Roman, grand-style figure of Samuel Johnson: a believer, albeit a troubled one. Hume, on the other hand, underwrites the art of Gainsborough – in his naturalness, distrust of the grandiose, bent towards particularity and rejection of authority. This is not argued through with great rigour: Hume ...”

“... Kipling and Newbolt were the most flourishing poets of the day. After ‘much falling’, Lionel Johnson had made his legendary descent to death from a bar stool, and Yeats’s other companions were no longer to be found in the Cheshire Cheese. The ‘Nineties’ were well over; Ezra Pound had not yet arrived in London, but a protean new movement, which ...”

“... Among the faithful is Danny Kruger, the MP for Devizes, a former political secretary to Boris Johnson, leader-writer at the Daily Telegraph and co-founder (with Miriam Cates) of the New Social Covenant Unit, a right-wing think tank. Ahead of NatCon, Kruger outlined his vision in the New Statesman. Britain, he asserted, is ruled by faceless ‘powers that ...”

“... is pure play – in this case, a literary gent playing with political sociology, rather like Alec Douglas-Home doing his economics with matches. And finally, Williams ought to know that cultural, intellectual and political change is indeed effected by minorities – often by minorities so small as to make his imaginary 10 or 15 per cent a very big ...”

“... by women lepers who fled to the Caucasus and coupled with jackals? Do surnames like Dunn, Grey and Douglas, and place-names like Dublin and Blackpool, indicate concealed African origins? Were the Mende people of West Africa the first to navigate to Peru? Did Egyptians build Stonehenge? Is Aids the outcome of a genocidal white conspiracy to eliminate ...”

“... the latest in fibreoptic Internet technology from AT&T and Hewlett-Packard, medical equipment from Johnson & Johnson and Glaxo Wellcome, and progressive education devised by Stanford University. Celebration was to be an experiment in neo-traditionalism and privatisation on a grand scale. To escape the soulless deserts of ...”

“... preservation, authenticity and vogueishness – have been dealt with explicitly by other writers: Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, Linton Kwesi Johnson, John Agard, Grace Nichols and Tom Leonard, to name a few. For some, ‘literary art’ is a territory to be attained (Harrison’s ‘we’ll occupy/ your lousy ...”

“... age of Enoch Powell – and, more specifically, they ignore the mass of evidence accumulated by Douglas Schoen in his Enoch Powell and the Powellites. Schoen gathered together all the opinion-poll data of the Powell years and showed that after the ‘rivers of blood’ speech of l968 Powell developed an immensely strong and loyal constituency, so much so ...”

“... and barren as any we had seen’ where ‘nothing but sterility was to be seen.’ Like Samuel Johnson in the Highlands, he was disturbed by the lack of trees: ‘Not a single tree or shrub, nor the least sign of any, was to be discovered.’ Even driftwood was missing: ‘throughout the whole extent of the harbour, I found not a single piece.’ Here Cook ...”

“... their living room in New York: Edmund Wilson, James Thurber, Walker Evans, James M. Cain, Nunnally Johnson, S.J. Perelman, Dawn Powell, Joseph Mitchell and John O’Hara. Many of these celebrated figures, artists and authors approaching fifty at the start of the decade or only lately past it, grew up in small provincial towns, emigrated to New York in the Jazz ...”

“... to seal her success, and that she lost her touch over the years that preceded the poll tax fiasco. Douglas Hurd mentioned on television that she should have gone two years before she did, but that he’d stuck by her as a minister till the bitter end, for her own sake and for the country’s. I’ve been talking here about contributors who wrote about her in ...”

“... she lost the war. Within a year Major, working in conjunction with the new foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, got her to sign up to ERM membership despite all her misgivings.How did Major and Hurd succeed where Lawson and Howe had failed? Ever sensitive to the idea that he was Thatcher’s poodle, the new chancellor was determined to prove his independence ...”