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“... a canvas on which majestic incompetence would be painted on a grander scale than ever before. Alan Clark’s The Donkeys was one of the first forays into the study of institutionalised military idiocy. More recently, after the glories of the Gulf War, American generals rejected intervention in Bosnia with the words, ‘We do deserts, we don’t do ...”

“... afterwards, MacGregor left the Department of Transport to become a director of the merchant bank Hill Samuel, which, while he had been Secretary of State, advised British Rail on the Channel Tunnel. (MacGregor has now been sacked in a cull of jobs at Hill Samuel, and we must wait for next year’s accounts to know the ...”

“... the Union in an election where he saw off more fancied candidates – including Damian Green and Alan Duncan – who were too busy squabbling to notice the threat he posed. Philip May presided over the Union in the spirit of his girlfriend. For his farewell debate he chose the topic of the professionalisation of sport and invited Theresa back to team up with ...”

“... on the right side of vitality.But we were only just beginning with burial sites. Cairnpapple Hill is the only spot in Scotland I’ve ever been to where you can see the two coasts at once. The summit of Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran can be seen in the west, and the Bell Rock, smack in the Firth of Forth, is clear on the other side, down to the ...”

“... are nutty professors, and some (to borrow a phrase from the character assassination of Anita Hill) are a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty. Two decades ago Edward Said argued that the function of the humanist was ‘to assure a harmless place for “the humanities” or culture or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over ...”

“... two Baptist churches – housed in modern, utilitarian buildings – joined them. At the top of a hill to the north of my house is St Andrew’s. Services there are non-committal, in the ‘God, as-it-were’ tradition of contemporary Anglicanism. The congregation isn’t large, but the organist is good and the sermons are short. The other local churches are ...”

“... It’s an odd sort of crime novel, because there isn’t really a crime. Detective Inspector Alan Grant of Scotland Yard is laid up in hospital with a broken leg, having fallen through a trapdoor in pursuit of a criminal; his friends bring him contemporary novels to help pass the time but Grant hates them all and is anguished with boredom. Then he comes ...”

“... and Holbeck. St Bartholomew’s was a great slum parish too, its huge black church set on a hill above Armley and Wortley, and though the slums around it have gone, or at any rate changed their character, its heavy spire still dominates the southern approaches to Leeds. The vicar in 1928 was the Reverend H. Lovell Clarke, subsequently Archdeacon of ...”

“... like a Buonaparte let not a thing remain, It levelled every bush and tree, and levelled every hill And hung the moles for traitors – though the brook is running still, It runs a naked stream, cold and chill. ‘Remembrances’ is printed without punctuation in the six-volume Oxford edition, as are all the other poems, but Bate adopts light punctuation ...”

“... a hint of condescension here. There are open seams in the plotting. Katherine’s besotted editor, Alan, works on her new novel, Consequences, till the last possible moment: ‘It had been a terrible wrench when he handed the typescript to his assistant to get it biked over to the Elysian people on that final afternoon.’ So the prize isn’t for published ...”

“... Richardson, wanting to keep her books in print, agreed to the edition, although she knew Dimple Hill, advertised as the final chapter-volume of Pilgrimage, was no such thing. The ensuing confusion and critical indifference were disheartening. Even though she worked intermittently during the last two decades of her life on March Moonlight, which she regarded ...”

“... o hyd.                                            Alan Llwyd This englyn, as so often, is dependent on particular Welsh assonances, but in at least some cases, and certainly in Dafydd ap Gwilym and the Mabinogi, the achievements are accessible in translation. Consider only this brief extract from the technique ...”

“... of the original cast members) and the other three-quarters of the Beyond the Fringe team (Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore), who would go on to present their own take on the nuclear threat, in a sketch called ‘Civil War’.In that sketch, a worried Moore listens trustingly as a succession of posh-voiced government spokesmen seek to ...”

“... and denunciation). The book ends with the screening of a film of Firbank toiling up the hill at Genzano on an expedition to Lake Nemi (a trip that took place, according to Lord Berners’s memoir of the writer, a few days before his death). A crowd of children, attracted by Firbank’s fatally idiosyncratic walk, collects and capers around him. The ...”

“... settlement. Between 1390 and 1397 he was building up his retinue (the subject, incidentally, of Alan Bennett’s sadly abandoned doctoral thesis) and intervening in local quarrels so as to support friends and punish enemies. His second marriage and an expedition to Ireland both helped affirm his manly status. ‘Now, more than ever,’ Fletcher tells ...”