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“... us flew out together, Air India, first class: Michael Foot, Jean Floud, William Radice, with Sir Richard Attenborough in pursuit. It was my pleasure to travel with my old friend and newly-minted Dame, Iris Murdoch. I’ve never travelled first before, and well! Cocktails, champagne, caviar, lobster ... Young Dame Iris, by the way, took all as her customary ...”

“... a fact which the British Government chose to disregard in 1917. Some thirty years afterwards the English Zionist Arthur Koestler described the Balfour Declaration as ‘one of the most improbable documents of all times’, since in it ‘one nation solemnly promised to a second nation the country of a third’. ‘Iimprobable’ the Balfour Declaration ...”

“... a culture of irresponsibility’ got under way. He also maintains that, ‘from the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there was one continuous civilisation built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles.’ Not only is this a virtually Panglossian account of the colonial revolution, the Civil War and ...”

“... days, it isn’t a machine that sits in a publisher’s computer room, but a cloud service, in English-language news publishing almost always provided by Google. (UK news publishers often worry that advertising revenue they should be getting is instead going to Google. Distrust of Google and resentment of its dominant position are common. But Google also ...”

“... which preceded it. It is no accident that millenarians who, like the Fifth Monarchy Men of the English Revolution, identify themselves with this kingdom are rarely supporters of established social traditions. Because he gives a description of the social and psychological changes that effect the degeneration of the metals and which culminate in the rule of ...”

“... Liberal Party. Thomas-Symonds makes clear that it made a difference which valley you came from. English-speaking towns like Ebbw Vale and Tredegar in Monmouthshire were Labour towns, unsusceptible to the apocalyptic communism of the Rhondda Valley slightly further west. In his early years, before he became a Labour councillor, Bevan was attracted by the ...”

“... suddenly, six volumes followed in quick succession, including a Selected Poems in 1968, which Richard Howard proclaimed ‘a masterpiece of our period’. Collected Poems appeared in 1972, and Harold Bloom called it the most distinguished book of American poetry since Wallace Stevens’s Collected Poems came out in the mid-1950s. It was ‘a major ...”

“... last plays so attractive to scholars and literary critics ever since the invention of English literature as an academic discipline at the end of the 19th century, a development which contributed to the more general modernist bid to rescue Shakespeare from easy popularity. Even the mock-medieval Pericles – which if it weren’t for its depictions ...”

“... narrating a public information film: the Eton boating song ‘conjures up for me a very pleasant English scene’.When the BBC switched to recording on tape, which could be edited before going out, scripts were no longer needed. ‘It was a great improvement,’ Plomley remarked. At last the series could be put ‘properly to work to fulfil its function of ...”

“... the Royal Festival Hall during a performance by the Philharmonia and London Symphony Chorus under Richard Hickox and not be shattered into submission. Belshazzar’s Feast takes Elgarian oratorio by its neck and flings it into the 20th century. But it is dramatically broken-backed. Its performing forces are massive; its timescale – it lasts roughly thirty ...”

“... voice’ proved a particular annoyance. Keynes, meanwhile, was the archetype of the haughty English lord; as White remarked to the British economist Lionel Robbins, ‘your Baron Keynes sure pees perfume.’ Squabbles aside, the two men ended up largely in agreement about the basic aims of the new international monetary system: to stabilise exchange ...”

“... in October, during what the Israeli Army called its ‘incursion’ – a euphemism inherited from Richard Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia – into towns under the nominal jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority. Young men distributed dry sticks of olive wood to dip into a barrel of fire. In Arabic and English, white ...”

“... and whose formative influence he sought early on to minimise. Walsh admits his dependence on Richard Taruskin’s ‘monumental’ Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, whose painstaking researches into Stravinsky’s early life and his relations with the Rimsky-Korsakov circle in St Petersburg give body to Walsh’s Stravinsky: A Creative Spring ...”

“... as a writing cyclist. First, for reasons that remained obscure, the interview was conducted in an English town where the car-centric ‘cycle network’ forced us to push our bikes through a maze of potholed lanes and ‘Cyclists Dismount’ signs. Second, I woke up before Lance could reveal his secret strategy for winning the Tour de France a record sixth ...”

“... be amusing as well as alarming. The Late Lancashire Witches, a play of 1634 by Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, was both subversive comedy and topical commentary. In each case, the witches are female, their bodies corruptible, their passions unbridled. They mock and menace patriarchal political order (in The Late Lancashire Witches a codpiece is bewitched to ...”