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“... and social centre of Scotland. They made southern Scotland more populous, more stable, more urban, more Presbyterian and more law-abiding: in the Lowlands, the fortified tower house gave way to the country house (for the rich, showing off had replaced feeling safe), while in the Highlands the castle persisted. Even so, the landscapes of both Highlands ...”

“... death rather than getting directly bumped off. The immensely entertaining once famous anthology by Hugh Greene, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, reveals a whole world of small crimes and cunning criminals, a milieu more like Damon Runyon and his wiseguys than that of contemporary genre fiction: hardly anyone is killed, and the narratorial point of view is by no ...”

“... thesis, if something so underdeveloped can be called that, was widely shared in Whitehall. When Hugh Trevor-Roper joined MI6 in 1941, he doubted that ‘there was one man [there] at that time, who had read Mein Kampf’. Indeed, Hitler’s rise to power made virtually no impression at all on the ‘defenders of the realm’, except as an opportunity to ...”

“... believer in writing as a public, material art form, a proud member of the ‘inquiring rootless urban intelligentsia’ brought into being by the 1944 Education Act, would Carter have been pleased to find her papers in public ownership? Better that than pawed at by some oligarch collector, like the creepy Grand Duke in Nights at the Circus, but whether she ...”

“... Various literary luminaries contributed verses to the Crudities, among them Donne, Jonson, Hugh Holland and John Davies of Hereford. Other contributors included Lionel Cranfield, later Earl of Middlesex; Sir Henry Goodyer, the patron of the poet Drayton; and the architect Inigo Jones. The vein is one of mock-commendation, but the sheer bulk of the ...”

“... practised a theatrical as well as an artistic bohemianism, and was drawn to the grimier aspects of urban life, cultivated in the rooms he rented as studios in working-class areas of London. No picnics for him. ‘Dirty, tumbledown Camden town, Charlie Peace, pubs and cabbage’, was Hugh Walpole’s description of ...”

“... its power. When he went to Birmingham as a lecturer in classics, straight after Oxford, he wrote urban poetry with a democratic clarity that it is easy to undervalue. A lyric such as ‘Sunday Morning’ is refreshingly free from the Waste Land hysteria and pylon-school imagery that mars so much from the 1930s: ‘Down the road someone is practising ...”

“... were too primitive to have title over anything beyond personal property. In The Other Side of Eden Hugh Brody postulates millennia of conflict between hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists. It is the farmers, he asserts, not the hunters, who are continuously on the move. The farmers are the true ‘nomads’ as they push compulsively onwards and outwards in ...”

“... his credentials as a Cold Warrior of the liberal Right were impeccable. According to George Urban, the best inside source, he could be counted, by the mid-Eighties, among the select group of academics – Hugh Thomas, Brian Crozier, Norman Stone, Leonard Schapiro and others – lending extra-mural advice and ...”

“... was rather far from the majority view of Castro’s 26 July Movement. When Guevara finally met the urban leaders of the movement, in the mountains in Cuba early in 1957, he was shocked by ‘the evident anti-Communist inclinations’ that prevailed among them. There was an angry exchange of letters at the end of that year between Guevara and René Ramos ...”

“... times, one of them a ram-raid; so, coming away, I’m perhaps more conscious of vandalism and urban decay than I otherwise might be. The result is, when I see a starved-looking boy of ten and his sister, twelve or so, tugging at a bollard round some roadworks before sending it flying, I wind down the window and say primly: ‘That’s a pretty silly thing ...”

“... At least that is one point of view. Another – shared by the police, by Kenneth Clarke and by Sir Hugh Annesley, the Chief Constable of Northern Ireland – is that it is outmoded and favours the guilty, and should be scrapped because it is routinely exploited by clever criminals and terrorists. (Annesley has even suggested that refusal to answer police ...”

“... If this happens in the metropolis, imagine the colonies. And Havana was the nearest Latin city to urban America – unless you want to insult Tijuana and call it a city. Before 1960 there were a few private houses but these mostly published textbooks. Other adventurous printers, whom you could equate with gigolos, were engaged in some kind of vanity ...”