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“... determination that made Bertie, the stammering, nerve-racked and less than handsome second son of George V, persist in proposing to the woman he had decided, almost on sight, was the only person he would ever marry. With her eventual acceptance Elizabeth, equally determined in her way, had to bypass a number of unattractive facts. The king was a martinet on ...”

“... had gone wide of the mark and crashed through the animal’s eye. As it thrashed around in agony, George had just stood there, quivering and numb. It was left to Dorothy to fetch a clamp, secure the bloody, squealing creature by the nostrils and knock it dead with one almighty swing of the hammer. ‘Men!’ she had muttered, in a scornful tone of voice, and ...”

“... in utopian and dystopian writing – a world apart, for good or ill, as in Aldous Huxley’s Pala, George Orwell’s Airstrip One, the vivisectionist paradise of H.G. Wells’s Dr Moreau, Margaret Cavendish’s polymorphous freakshow in The Blazing World, or William Golding’s reworking of R.M. Ballantyne’s coral island as Beelzebub’s atoll ...”

“... spiritual side to her nature which … tugged at her like a kite at the end of a string’. George Wyndham, Margot Asquith. ‘When I read of Parnell or Lasalle or smaller men who have arrested attention,’ Margot confided in her diary in her twenties, ‘I feel full of envy, and wish I had been born a man. In a woman all this internal urging is a ...”

“... people who were in the crowd outside Buckingham Palace remember how they chanted: ‘We want George,’ ‘We want Liz.’ I don’t believe this. It’s what they would chant now so they think it was what they did then. The king was never ‘George’ still less the queen ‘Liz’. That was in the future (though not ...”

“... Crusoe walked out one day on the beach, and there he saw the fresh print of a naked foot on the sand. He had no law to tell him that was nothing but a circumstance. He knew when he saw that circumstance that a man had been there that was not himself ... It was nothing but circumstantial evidence. But it satisfied him. Whether or not Lizzie Borden had given ...”

“... On display​ in the Dutch House at Kew Gardens, the nursery of George III’s children, is a map copied by one of the royal infants from the jigsaws used by their governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, to teach them geography. It indicates, with affecting but spurious precision, the territorial boundaries of the 12 tribes of Israel, in what the children, like almost everyone else in the 18th and 19th centuries, called the Holy Land ...”

“... you, noting the spread of buzzards from the red soil of your West Country childhood to the grey sand of your East Anglian retirement, mourning lost redpolls but finding solace in siskins, watching lapwings mopping at a wet sky, or hearing a woodcock grunting its love song overhead at dusk, or feeling redstarts tug you in pursuit of them by quivering their ...”

“... national hero, following his acquittal in three successive trials for libel. In October 1795, when George III was on his way to open the new session of Parliament, the window of the state coach was broken by a missile which came from an angry crowd demanding lower food prices and an end to the war with France. It was probably a stone, but the king and his ...”

“... West in She Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel. Best of all – albeit in a big failure – he met George Cukor and Katharine Hepburn on a film, Sylvia Scarlett, that was too daring for its time, in which he played Jimmy Monkley, a Cockney con artist, and felt able to be himself.He needed this, for his life was in crisis. In late 1933, at his father’s ...”

“... and at night the lovers on the mosaic sidewalks cast enormous long shadows over the soiled sand. I remember the shock of the first Saturday I was there, how there were dozens of football matches being played with extraordinary speed and ferocity on the beach, most of the players black and beautiful, the supporters letting off bangers every time a goal ...”

“... of things can be fully comprehended or confined by any set of conceptual categories: the sand of experience and evidence is always slipping between the fingers. Yet there is a confidence about his analysis, a sense of that mastery of an intensely difficult pursuit which he recognises as one of the most highly civilised expressions of the aggressive ...”

“... he writes less than he might have done, has affairs with vicious boys and slips into retirement. George Loftus, who comes from the institute where Philip used to work, to clean the Layburn pictures, is too young to have long memories and ponders his unrequited interest in the institute’s red-haired receptionist. The centrepiece of the still life is Bob and ...”

“... heart and work, anonymously, on a rig for six months – participatory journalism in the style of George Plimpton? Or will he set off by small boat and sail from rig to rig (‘Ahoy there, your muse wishes to come on board’) as the word ‘journey’ in the title might imply? Will there be storms? Will Alvarez come close to the edge of life? Will the ...”

“... considered view of a serious scholar on the sense of a difficult text. This is certainly true of George Goold’s Aeneid, which I am careful to consult often and thoughtfully. Loebs are sometimes useful, too, as providing a text (of sorts) for authors not otherwise easily available, and as giving rapidly the context in, say, some long, sticky passage of ...”