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“... identified far more with their local village or region than with the nation. Most of the fighting took place around the Isonzo River in the north-east, but the front stretched west through Trentino and Alto Adige, and it was here that what Mark Thompson describes as ‘the white war’ really took place. The spectacular ...”

“... at once, synergistically melding the public requirement into his own private fantasy, so that each took off from the other: This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque and the postal order ... The service helps to keep capitalism going, but more importantly it feeds the poet’s fancy: at a time of waiting for the end, with the slump (now ...”

“... French at Salamanca, but Napoleon and Wellington were speedily alert to tricks of that sort: as he took his countermeasures Wellington is said to have observed to his Spanish colleague: Mon cher Alava, Marmont est perdu. Whether in games or battles, devices that are seen to be devices seldom come off. At Zama Hannibal tried the cushion trick again, combining ...”

“... prolific: nobody could begin to say how many thousands of his pictures have survived, and how John Bonehill, the curator of this exhibition, decided on his final selection I can’t imagine. Sandby was also enormously versatile: he worked in watercolour, bodycolour (gouache) and oil, he etched, he was the first professional artist in Britain to work in ...”

“... of my forehead-house and down the sides. No need for cream separators here someone said. My guide took it as a compliment. Anyway, we got here. Somehow. Now the question is losing relevance since water is everywhere, like a transparent mine. I lost my voice a long time ago. Voices of children ripple endlessly, endorsing new products. The lizard-god ...”

“... to the writers who give each literary age its actual and particular flavour. Once it was Sir John Squire and Edward Shanks – obviously the most significant and influential voices of the time. During or just after the last war it was Connolly and Koestler and Spender, William Plomer, Alun Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Peter Quennell. Some still have life or fame ...”

“... black traders) when he was 11 and taken into slavery. He was sold to a British naval captain and took part in many naval engagements during the Seven Years’ War. He bought his freedom in 1766 but continued to sail on merchant ships and voyages of exploration. In 1777 he settled in London, where he met leading abolitionists. His Interesting Narrative is ...”

“... at the six volumes of Brian Vickers’s Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage, Bate shows that one John Potter had stoutly defended the play’s oddities many years earlier in the Theatrical Review. The real aficionados had always been enlightening and surprising in their championship of the Bard: what mattered in Hazlitt’s time, however, was a more general ...”

“... this time in a more objectively historical context. Hamilton offers 22 case studies, from John Donne – the first properly biographed English author – to Philip Larkin of last month’s Observer fame. Hamilton could not, if he tried, write an unreadable book. Keepers of the Flame is that rarest of modern things, lit crit with laughs. Hamilton has ...”

“... England. The runaway bestseller of the 1840s and 1850s was Macaulay’s History of England, which took up the story in 1685 and spotlighted the Revolution of 1688 as Britain’s entry into the modern era of popular sovereignty, constitutional government and the rule of law. A mammoth work on the Tudors was the last thing anyone wanted; and when Froude’s ...”

“... masterpiece of ‘Seaton’s Aunt’. The process works another way, too. In his splendid stories John Updike creates a far more telling image of himself as a denizen of suburban America, and a participator in its ritual matings and partings, than if he had spelt it all out in the true first person, recounting his triumphs and disasters in the field of sex ...”

“... Andrew Chatto who had drive, and W.E. Windus, a minor poet who had some capital. But the firm only took off with the acquisition a few years later of John Hotten’s, Henry Bohn’s and John Maxwell’s publishing properties. Macmillan absorbed the house of Bentley in 1898; Murray absorbed ...”

“... Joseph Farington and, best of all, Thomas Jones and William Hodges. Unlike Gainsborough, who took off from the tradition of Dutch landscape painting, in Rome Wilson became a follower of the school of Claude Lorrain, more classically Arcadian in its subjects and atmosphere, more expansive in its distances. ‘You may walk in Claude’s pictures and count ...”

“... Part Two, and to escape arrest he fled to France, accompanied by the Wykehamist gentleman-lawyer John Frost, described by Hitchens as secretary of the London Corresponding Society. The LCS was a society of radical artisans, not a gentleman’s club, and its secretary was in fact the shoemaker Thomas Hardy. The trial proceeded in Paine’s absence, and ...”

“... to sit on so that at least I could force a smile’), Prescott and his bulimia. Cherie Blair and John Prescott may not have been the most unpopular figures of Blair’s government but they were the two who had the hardest time in the press. Both spent long stretches in the contemporary equivalent of the stocks; a scarring experience, and both of them were ...”