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“... Humphrey Jennings never lacked a sense of self-worth. Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he had a brief affair in 1937, remembered him jumping up and down on their Parisian hotel bed crying out: ‘Look at me! … Don’t you think I’m beautiful?’ In fact, she thought he looked like Donald Duck, and insisted he put his clothes on and take her to meet André Breton ...”

“... In the mid-Eighties, my family felt everything would be fine if I could just get something with a shirt and tie. My three elder brothers wore nailbags, overalls and aprons – the respective black robes of time-served apprenticeship – but even that world was going by the time it got to be my turn, and it was hoped that I might be found fit for the crisp shirt and tie of the clerical elect ...”

“... a Parsi. The Parsis were staunch supporters of the British in India, and on their marriage, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer received a set of embroidered doylies from the Parsi community of Bombay. There are elements of the same loyalty in The Golden Thread. Not for this author the arms-length distrust of the British as tight-lipped and thin-blooded. She ...”

“... and lozenge sapphires decorating the plackart and sabatons, like those on the godlike kit made for Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Both these decorative features and Bermejo’s Netherlandish fastidiousness in describing every plate, vambrace and voider are further reasons to believe that he spent time in the workshop of a prestigious Flemish master before ...”

“... heart, has perhaps less taste than Emily Brontë for the wild solitudes of the moors; indeed Charles Jennings in Up North, his ‘travels beyond the Watford Gap’, an only half-humorous exploration of regional difference, complains that the North is deficient in open space. In the current denigration of the North, whether at the hands of writers or ...”

“... to have come through the school in recent years, has described a visit to White Lodge by Prince Charles while she was a pupil there, during which security dogs, nosing around in advance of the royal party, sniffed out her stash of forbidden chocolate. But there are other stories. Classical dance is fixated on youth, on yet to be fulfilled promise; it ...”

“... and Betrayal, the highly prejudicial ABC programme of 12 April 1996, in which the newscaster Peter Jennings called McVeigh a ‘monster’ and cited passages from Pierce’s book. Parallels between bomb-making in The Turner Diaries and by McVeigh were made much of in Joseph Hartzler’s opening address to the jury. The only material evidence produced by the ...”

“... are lightly dispatched. Then, at greater length, the received doctrines of Bagehot, Dicey and Jennings are dismissed as so many crude or mischievous simplifications of the subtler, more surprising reality of Britain’s heritage. Having demolished these, Mount proceeds to pass in review the actual shape of the country’s constitution – an edifice ...”

“... Craig Raine recalls that when the former chairman of Faber, Charles Monteith, encountered the suggestion that one of Philip Larkin’s poems was indebted to Théophile Gautier, he was ‘incredulous’. To Monteith, the idea that Larkin might have been influenced by a foreign poet was ‘ludicrous’. ‘He had fallen,’ Raine comments, ‘for the propaganda – Larkin’s bluff, insular, faux-xenophobic self-caricature ...”

“... deplored his scruffiness, but his closest associates, for instance, Jacob Bronowski and Humphrey Jennings, and those seniors best qualified to judge – I.A. Richards especially – admired him greatly. The quality of his writing as an undergraduate is not surprising only because we have been brought up to believe, with approximate accuracy, that Seven Types ...”

“... more intelligible subject of Resistentialism (les choses sont contre nous) as expounded by Paul Jennings. Experts are entitled to have their specialities appraised by experts, but the layman venturing into what look like no-go areas gets the feeling that he is being offhandedly, if not wantonly, blinded with science. Perhaps one of the medical entries is ...”

“... State. This independence of mind emerges in his discussion of ‘Refounding the City with Prince Charles’. For Wright, there is much to like about the Prince, and much to detest and despise about his critics. ‘He has shown that the periphery is where the disorders of the centre are most manifest ... there is scarcely one of his chosen themes that does ...”

“... king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament was supposed to end with one big battle at Edgehill on 23 October 1642. But it lasted four years. And even after ...”

“... Al Capone and a white-haired/eyebrowed/moustachioed, black-coated Supreme Court Chief Justice, Charles Evans Hughes. There’s Harpo again, this time with cotton-wool locks, alongside his brothers – Groucho’s moustache, glasses, cigar, wing-tipped head of hair, Chico’s sly open mouth and steel-wool hair identifying the ersatz Italian Jew. The three ...”

“... Edward VIII is now to be called, is a benumbed and bitchy mummy’s boy (played here by Alex Jennings, a seasoned royal impersonator), and he spends the entirety of The Crown’s first series bumbling about and giggling at farting pugs. Some people imagine that such a life is no kind of life at all, but the avoidance of tasks can be a full-time job, and ...”