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“... is what it costs these days to make England look like England. The show was created and written by Peter Morgan, its majesty and its wit are his – it would take an American ‘writers’ room’ of a dozen to do wrong what he does right – and a slew of British directing talent led by Stephen Daldry has brought it to the small screen. The British settings ...”

“... two poets would you reckon was the more self-centred, fond of flowers, susceptible to hyphens, keen on using the word mother? Such are the questions that can spin off from too many hours spent browsing in the realms of the Concordance. It so happens that both Larkin and Eliot have lately had their works ‘concorded’* – that’s to say, worked over ...”

“... wheel of a splendid motor (‘a shimmering AC’, according to Joseph Connolly), looking like Lord Peter Wimsey. Connolly also records that Wodehouse crashed this car, in the Ukridge manner, and never drove again. But let that pass. Herbert Warren Wind is a serious man. Here is his most serious sentence – and I am not smiling now. ‘During the Second World ...”

“... marriage to go, people were telling each other that they had already separated. Her former lover, Peter Quennell, eager for bad news, invited her to lunch at the Etoile and asked about her sex life. But that day she didn’t feel like doing Connolly down, so Quennell soon got bored and asked for the bill. While Cyril dined out on their quarrels, his ...”

“... potent. His popularity shows, among other things, how those with the instinct to opt out have a keen relish for opting in at second hand. The true devotees of Greyfriars have never left home; no stigma attaches to being a secret fantasy-snob and no one minds being bullied in a book. But Christopher Sykes, who saw much of Waugh in the Army, and who remained ...”

“... V. Prochnow Jr, with 65 entries by Prochnow senior; and in Quotations For Our Time, by Dr Laurence Peter (author of The Peter Principle), with 37 entries of his own. It’s not wholly a new conceit: even L. T. Hoyt, last century, was not so unjust to himself as to deny his own verses comparison with those of Tennyson and ...”

“... Walcott’s extravagance of poetic diction and tendency to verbosity off-putting in the past’ (Peter Porter); ‘I feel that the fuss and the language are not quite justified by the donné’ (Roy Fuller). Derek Walcott has suffered, perhaps more than any other contemporary poet writing in English, from accusations that his work is too showy. Some of the ...”

“... reason the new British Prime Minister often favoured the claims of French generals who seemed less keen on fighting another Somme. Hence the shortlived supremacy in the early part of 1917 of Nivelle, a man who was fluent and articulate in English, his second language (rather like Lloyd George himself). Recently a colonel, now suddenly a general, Nivelle came ...”

“... to give the Germans a good first dose of the Mustard gas before the end of the month. Haig is vy keen on it – we shall I think have enough to produce a decided effect. Their whining in defeat is vy gratifying to hear. This is immediately followed by a richly sentimental paragraph about their tenth wedding anniversary. Some of the seeds of Churchill’s ...”

“... don’t converse in Dutch. Before this change of heart, it sometimes seemed as if the Dutch were keen to close off their language as a means of closing off and protecting their own native community. One would often be told with pride of the peculiarities and the impenetrability of the Dutch – ‘don’t even try to understand us,’ people often said to ...”

“... quite as strong as our sense of jubilation, of ‘a giant step for mankind’. Further, as Peter and Leni Gillman suggest (prosaically or poetically), ‘Space Oddity’ sounds like an experience of shooting heroin, and they sternly quote another Bowie lyric: Ashes to ashes, funk to funky, We know Major Tom’s a junkie. Anyway, Major Tom helped to ...”

“... anthems Hymn to St Cecilia (classy words by Auden, usefully decent treble solo)♪ and Hymn to St Peter (eerie plainsong effect, also with coveted treble solo opportunity).♪ In the cathedral, thrillingly at night, that enormous building dark and mysterious beyond our spotlit oasis, we thrashed our way through an evening performance of Noye’s ...”

“... want any of them Virgin Marys busting in and burning the place down’) makes a keen impression on the young Jenkins. Beloved by the parlourmaid Billson who is herself beloved by the soldier-servant Bracey: ‘Albert, for his part, possessed that touch of narcissism to be found in some artists whatever their medium – for Albert was ...”

“... counterculture properly situated on Enlightenment’s radical fringes. Bourke’s Burke was a keen student of Montesquieu, like other members of the moderate Enlightenment, and emerges as an enlightened man of ‘system’ who was ‘never a straightforward antagonist of generalising theory’. Although Burke, in Reflections on the Revolution in France ...”

“... of the world He, perhaps, is the most insignificant. But as soon as the divine word Reaches his keen ear, The poet’s soul starts up Like an awakened eagle – and remarks that this is not ‘a transformation of the one into the other, but ... a complete, uncompromising replacement of the man by the Poet’. Later, he sees the same opposition in the ...”