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“... after less than a year – two mothers lost before she was three. The family was Scotch-Irish, stern, devout and patriotic. Her father, Reverend Warner, was pastor to the Presbyterian church in Gettysburg; he watched the battle from a trapdoor in his roof and when it ended delivered his eyewitness account not only in churches and lecture halls up and down ...”

“... wider. Wilhelm cultivated his grandfather, the ageing Emperor Wilhelm I, symbol of unification and stern Prussian virtues. He was enchanted by Tsarism and spouted anti-English sentiments at every opportunity, scornfully dismissing his maternal grandmother as ‘the Empress of Hindustan’. At home he supported the anti-semitic movement of the Court preacher ...”

“... he had to sell the boat and return to dentistry.’ The book is dedicated to his father – ‘For James Edwin Vann, 1940-80’ – and the dedication page bears a fuzzy photograph of a man and a boy in wet-weather gear, holding up their fishing catch. Although ostensibly a super-smooth, mucho-macho Vanity Fair-style account of his failed attempt to establish ...”

“... country sensible discussion of terrorism is still possible. Charles Townshend, Paul Wilkinson and James Adams are immune to the hysteria that has afflicted Reagan’s America. Performing a miracle of compression, Mr Townshend tells the story of British ‘counter-insurgency’ in Ireland, the Middle East, India, Malaya, South Africa and Kenya. The author of ...”

“... Day’ publication, ‘Civilians and Barbarians’) from Spenser’s slurs on the Irish (‘stern and savage’) to certain terms bandied about today: ‘terrorist’, ‘bomber’. Brian Friel, another of the ‘Field Day’ directors, does something similar in his play, Translations, which isn’t only about the act of translating place-names from ...”

“... American professor and collector, Mortimer Cropper; Maud’s exuberant American colleague Leonora Stern; her ex-lover, the lupine Fergus Wolff; and Hildebrand Ash, an heir of very little brain. Others play a part, too, and strange alliances are formed and shift among them. Meanwhile the relationship between Roland and Maud develops into something both less ...”

“... womanliness, the glowing, melting sentiments, while David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson weighed in from North of the border. The Irish were never just gorillas with gelignite. Those Irish historians who play down the anti-Irishness of the British for their own political ends are right to that extent. It would be surprising if people ...”

“... more extreme counter-insurgency methods back to the British, who used them to combat Irgun and the Stern Gang, the first modern terrorists in the Middle East. That too must be regarded as part of Britain’s imperial legacy. ‘We are the last penumbra of empire,’ the then deputy chief of SIS, Gerry Warner, told the queen in the 1990s, and there was a ...”

“... photographed in plus-fours, so that he seemed to have very long ankles, and Elgar, a grey, stern, stiff old man, his white moustache a frozen waterfall over his lip. Menuhin, in a note written when he was much older, described this first encounter with the great English composer: how Elgar played a few bars of his Violin Concerto with the boy at the ...”

“... Lady Longford on Queen Victoria, Sir Philip Magnus on Edward VII, Lady Donaldson on Edward VIII, James Pope-Hennessy on Queen Mary and Sir John Wheeler-Bennett on George VI. Now the wheel has come full circle, and we are back to George V again. Is there any need for this? If plain history does not repeat itself, is there any reason why royal biography ...”

“... private friends, any private life. George Spater quotes from some notes made by Cobbett’s son, James, who was projecting a biography but found the task difficult, as well he might. In 1865, James wrote of his father: He had but little individual attachment. Liked people’s company; – they liked his (when he was ...”

“... lecturer. He died in 1944. Leacock held his own in the world of Will Rogers, Robert Benchley, James Thurber, the early Wodehouse, A.P. Herbert and ‘Beachcomber’. Americans, or some of them, accepted him as a successor to Mark Twain. His Yankee-style hyperbole did not, for once, upset the British, for he practised the tricks of ‘sly English ...”

“... of words and things and half-grasped insights – soon after, I had the same experience with Henry James’s What Maisie Knew, chosen because of the Degas on the cover – seems to me the pattern of most readerly initiations. We aren’t drawn in by the argument, or what’s said or shown. Rather something feels right, smells right, in the colour and flavour ...”

“... that Clancy knows the back lots and the business. For his B-list screenwriting client Stewart Stern, Clancy pulled off a coup by getting him big bucks and a big assignment: Rebel without a Cause. Afterwards, according to Clancy, Jack Warner pushed him against the wall – ‘He positively fire breathes Brut aftershave’ – and tore him off a ...”

“... Redmond O’Hanlon’s account of a journey to Borneo, undertaken with the poet James Fenton, was a grand deception, in which the ostensible search for an indigenous rhinoceros on the slopes of a mountain fastness turned out to be so much camouflage. Clues as to what was really happening could be glimpsed in the structure of O’Hanlon’s narrative ...”