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“... Sassoons, one wonders, to catalogue its journey down that profound dull tunnel? Nancy and Richard Newell’s book suggests that they do, quoting a poem by a Soviet paratrooper who was killed in Afghanistan more than a year ago, a young man who wrote to his lover about his own future death: He did not live beyond the hour before dawn He fell on his ...”

“... Hits Iceberg’, the balloon is still an object of inexhaustible rhetorical possibility. As Richard Holmes observes early in Falling Upwards, ‘all balloon flights are naturally three-act dramas’: the launch, the flight and the landing replicate the stages of every journey or human relationship – a set of parallels most recently and memorably ...”

“... Brighton had several, and became the epitome of the beach. ‘You hear nothing and see nothing,’ Richard Jeffries wrote of Brighton’s beach in The Open Air (1885): It is perfectly comfortable, perfectly jolly and exhilarating, a preferable spot to any other. A sparkle of sunshine on the breakers, a dazzling gleam from the white foam, a warm sweet ...”

“... much of it is left for us to be in touch with? I felt in touch with it myself one afternoon, three miles from my home, when I started to climb a scaur of limestone that formed the jamb of a narrow cave. At my feet I noticed a kestrel, a young one, crouching motionless on the grass with wisps of down still clinging to its head. I looked for its parents and saw ...”

“... a decayed industrial wilderness, is brutally elided. The tongue of poisoned land, a couple of miles to the east of the Royal Naval College (film set, banqueting hall for hire, weddings a speciality), that is being prepared for its tent-show apocalypse, has never previously been part of the Greenwich story. The peninsula, if you check it out on a ...”

“... a ditch. Where had they come from? Where were they going? The nearest place, east or west, was 30 miles distant. There was no vehicle in sight that could have brought them to Questa, or that was going to take them away. On they marched. Tap, tap, tap, went their little drums. Trample, shuffle, trample, went their bare or sandalled feet on the side of the ...”

“... a good one and a bad. New to me and truly funny, for instance, is ‘The Skinhead Hamlet’ by Richard Curtis. I am grateful, and yet this gift-horse must be looked in the mouth since it is a stalking-horse. It isn’t a parody at all but a spoof and a burlesque. Brett’s dullard identifying of two main types of parody (of style and of form!) isn’t even ...”

“... consult the vet. But eventually she wended her way across half Australia, even if the last fifty miles lo the Indian Ocean were travelled by truck (camels and all) from a friendly cattle station. That is not a small feat. In the course of it she had seen a great deal of the Aborigines, whom she was predisposed to like and respect, and on whose behalf she ...”

“... of a man regarded as one of the most unreal, isolated and timeless figures of the Victorian era. Richard Burton arrived in the Adriatic port in 1873 as Britain’s consul. He had pretty much seen everything. He had visited sacred centres from Benares to Salt Lake City, with a pilgrimage to Mecca in between; he had trekked thousands of ...”

“... parallel when Clinton was told that the architect of his ‘family values’ election campaign, Richard Morris, was about to be exposed in the press as the assiduous client of a call-girl, with whom he had shared White House secrets. It was the worst possible kind of scandal for Clinton, given the past stories of his own extra-marital affairs, now more ...”

“... his play The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck (1634). Warbeck was a pretender who claimed to be Richard, Duke of York, one of the princes in the Tower murdered by Richard III. The new king, Henry VII, refers to pursuing the pretender in his quest for sanctuary: ‘How closely we have hunted/This cub, since he ...”

“... into the bus and fired 24 more. They drove away in a blue Escort van that was later found eight miles away in the hills that mark the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. Darren Graham is the premature baby Cecil Graham was visiting when the IRA killed him. He is the embodiment of all the reasons why the idea of ‘two ...”

“... with Roman citizenship, which their sons would inherit. In the book accompanying the exhibition, Richard Abdy, one of the curators, quotes Yann Le Bohec’s characterisation of the army as a ‘machine for creating Roman citizens’, at least until the Emperor Caracalla’s edict of 212 which extended citizenship to all free subjects of the ...”

“... effective he was. The jury was taken aback when Mr Heseltine’s Civil Service Private Secretary, Richard Mottram, casually revealed, to the incredulity of Ponting’s counsel and the jury, that the Commander-in Chief’s Official Report on the Falklands War had been tampered with behind his back, in relation to the crucial timing of the contact between HMS ...”

“... a documentary about a vast region without a single National Geographic banality concerning square miles, population figures or the value of timber and fur exports. The programme was the first of a projected trilogy; the second was to be about Newfoundland. Gould went there in 1968, fully aware of its Viking history, ‘in search of characters for a ...”