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“... ten episodes are laid out in sequence, with dates and agendas. The voiceover narrative, written by Geoffrey Ward, is remorseless and untheatrical, just as Peter Coyote’s spoken narration is dry, unaccented and a little formal, as if reading out a casualty report. But Burns and Novick seem to understand how specious it would be to make this a tidy, organised ...”

“... Palmer has generally been well served by his modern biographers. The landmark in the field is Geoffrey Grigson’s Samuel Palmer: The Visionary Years (1947), still highly readable because animated by all of Grigson’s brilliant erudition and spirit of advocacy. Lord David Cecil’s long chapter in his 1969 book Visionary and Dreamer: Two Poetic Painters ...”

“... Dell himself, who would become the key legislator on oil, had co-authored a book with Christopher Hill, the Balliol historian. When Dell’s Committee began its work it picked Robert Neild at Cambridge as its adviser but Balogh, who was worried that ‘the fucking shits will get away with it,’ got his Balliol colleague, Andrew Graham, to brief Neild. The ...”

“... present his students with two unattributed poems, one from The Darkening Ecliptic and one from Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns; candidates were asked to guess which was a hoax, and give reasons for their choice. Half the students, Ashbery reports, picked the Malley poem, and half picked the Hill. As Heyward points ...”

“... to the regimental archive. In 1987, the regimental secretary, Lt-Col Ronald Woodhouse, told Geoffrey Levy of the Daily Mail: ‘I am positive now that Sergeant Archer is in no way related to Jeffrey Archer, the author and politician.’ As for Archer the officer and Archer the consul, a trail through the Army and Diplomatic Lists fails to reveal any ...”

“... Fringe. I had a pretty quiet war really. I was one of the Few. We were stationed down at Biggin Hill. One Sunday we got word Jerry was coming in, over Broadstairs, I think it was. We got up there quickly as we could and, you know, everything was very calm and peaceful. England lay like a green carpet below me and the war seemed worlds away. I could see ...”

“... shape it for us. ‘Never did sun more beautifully steep/In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill’: in these lines the beauty of the London morning is evoked and confirmed through a comparison with what it is not, and the speaker’s own situation comes to be seen as it would be if he were standing not in the city but in a more characteristically ...”

“... or bet on, likely looking champion competitors. Since 2014, an annual lawnmower race up Harbour Hill has allowed frustrated boy (and girl) racers to be petrolheads for the day.Last year’s sheep races raised £40,000 for a local charity that subsidises residents’ medical prescriptions to UK levels. There is no NHS on Sark: the island pays for a doctor to ...”

“... the property or the person, as Miliband could be seen, seemingly untailed, striding round Primrose Hill (and indeed the world) while the brace of bobbies still hung doggedly about his doorstep. When they do eventually depart the first casualties will be among the cyclists of whom, judging from the bikes leaning on the railings, there are many in the ...”

“... the other half is killing. Many of the men of C Company die in the extended fight to capture a hill from the enemy, but those who reach the top proceed to kill, and kill rampantly, horribly. It is then, during the massacre of the defeated Japanese, that Train is moved to ask: ‘This great evil, where’s it come from? How’d it steal into the world? What ...”

“... in running newly privatised services, such as the prison escort service for the East Midlands. Sir Geoffrey Howe’s departure from government in November 1990 was followed on 8 January 1991 by appointment to a nonexecutive directorship at BICC, the international cable and construction group, for which it was reported that he was to receive an annual salary of ...”

“... to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.5 March. On my walk I pass the Primrose Hill Community Library, which is closed to borrowers today but open for children, who throng the junior library, some of them sitting with an adult presumably learning to read, others in groups being told stories and at every table children reading on their ...”

“... those works which become an old favourite while still brand new. And finally, America adored him. Geoffrey Grigson, an early supporter and subsequently an astringent critic, thought Thomas appealed especially to ‘persons of a kind needing shots of the notion of art as others need shots of insulin, of a kind put on heat by the slightest contact with artists ...”

“... crossbar of a bike. I’ve never seen this before and find it cheering. 1 October. I am reading Geoffrey Moorhouse’s book on the Pilgrimage of Grace and have reached the point in October 1536 when Robert Aske and the huge rebel host are at Doncaster waiting to move south, virtually unopposed. It’s a campaign that would surely have changed the course of ...”

“... a chimney-sweep or a coalman rampaged through our spotless house. I look up chimney-sweeps in Geoffrey Grigson’s The Englishman’s Flora (shamefully out of print) and find that, the flowers being black and dusty, chimney-sweep and chimney-sweeper are Warwickshire slang for the plantain, particularly the ribwort, and that these were used to bind up ...”