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“... put to flight the emperors of both East and West on the same day. What have we to fear from King David and ‘his half-naked natives’?If Walter Espec did say anything of this sort, his words wouldn’t have meant much to his English levies. Some of it is simply false, such as the same-day defeat of both emperors (the events were in fact two years apart, in ...”

“... other novels and stories. Such children are at the centre of William Trevor’s tenth novel and David Profumo’s first; or rather, Trevor seems to have chosen to place young Tom both centrally and peripherally (as children often are, in fiction and in life), while Profumo makes young James the very eyes and ears of his book, though distancing him by ...”

“... worried that she had been bullied into it. The speakers at their memorial included Hugh Casson and David Astor. ‘Why haven’t you thrown them away?’ I asked my friend Catherine Freeman, the 87-year-old owner of the dusty folder I’ve been drawing from. ‘They will help me as I plan my own service,’ she said. I wondered if the challenge of throwing ...”

“... settle for being remembered for what was said to them as opposed to what they said themselves. David Livingstone went through hell before arriving at Lake Tanganyika in October 1871, but his stories about that journey would never enter the language the way Stanley’s would, when he caught up with him at Ujiji. Fourteen years earlier Livingstone had given ...”

“... In July, David Freud, the Conservative peer in charge of changes to the benefit system, wondered aloud in the Lords whether the boom in food banks was ‘supply-led’ or ‘demand-led’. Two years ago, 70,000 people used food banks and now 347,000 do. ‘What is a supply-led food bank?’ another peer wanted to know ...”

“... This​ is a dry and dutiful book which reads like a ghost story. The person being haunted is David Cameron. Theresa May grew up in a Cotswolds village called Church Enstone, where her father was vicar for much of the 1960s. The vicarage is within five miles of what became Cameron’s constituency home when he was MP for Witney and is roughly the same distance from what is now Soho Farmhouse, a members’ club, a little piece of the metropolis that is a haven for the Chipping Norton set ...”

“... used to buy the original Comic Cuts, in the late Thirties and early Forties. It was printed on green paper, if I remember, and featured strip cartoons of Laurel and Hardy, Flanagan and Allen, Arthur Askey, and Old Mother Riley the female impersonator.) I support this project, and I want it to be carried out skilfully, not clumsily. (‘Comic Cuts’ is an ...”

“... prove that she was really there, Margaret added that her neighbour’s hose was of ‘a seawater green colour’. But a woman who said that a man ‘took up her clothes in a very uncivil way’ was describing forced sex. Another was tripped up by a young man who threw her on the ground, ‘taking up her clothes, leaving her naked, and attempting to have his ...”

“... to it in its entirety. Given the thicket of ambiguous rules and regulations set out in The Green Book: A Guide to Members’ Allowances, it’s not surprising that most MPs seem to have followed the example of Margaret Beckett, who confessed: ‘I just grabbed together the relevant things and bunged them into the Fees Office and left it to them to sort ...”

“... obscure, from about March to May.Behind the two personages and the table between them is a heavy green curtain, and they and the table are standing on a floor elegantly coloured and patterned in squares and circles enclosed in a continuous decorative band; it looks like a mosaic but has none of the lines on it which Holbein would surely have been delighted ...”

“... we have not been very successful in life’; and this park itself, brand-new, a made-island of green in all this grave ocean, and in this silence, a little noise. The leaves are blown aslant and in their shade a few lie prostrate on young grass, mothers, young girls, two boys together; and meditate, or talk inaudibly; on benches, men without colour sit ...”

“... stupefied or browbeaten look of an abandoned croft-house ... Here was Unnimore.’ Here, too, was David Craig, groping through a wilderness in Morvern in search of a long-abandoned hamlet; his treasure-trove the remains of eight little houses, their stones covered with ‘whiskery grey lichens’. A hundred pages on, our intrepid explorer is being driven ...”

“... for example, next to a skeleton in a vitrine, there used to be a replica of Michelangelo’s David, exposing himself, scarlet Y-fronts fashionably dropped, to show a sea cucumber-like penis quite unlike the original. Their numbers have now dwindled to a mere million or so, but forty years ago there were many millions of monks in Siam (as Anderson often ...”

“... or hopelessly distant bodies could be gathered within a domestic and familiar trope, the green thought in the green shade. Wordsworth notes that the epitaph tends to record the good in everyone, as if they had inhabited a world without cruelty or evil, or mere human failings: ‘the affections are their own ...”

“... chosen policy. The key event here is the Richard Wilson exhibition of 1982-3, organised by David Solkin, whose thoughtful and carefully researched catalogue attempted to situate Wilson’s landscapes in a range of historical contexts including the moral and political ideas and ideals attached to the ownership of land in the 18th century. Editorials in ...”