“... and then sent down in pieces’. It was an understandable, perhaps an inevitable reaction. As Cecil Beaton once pointed out, taste takes on average 25 years to complete a cycle and bring the fashions of the previous generation back if not into vogue then at least into critical focus. But in the case of Brown that did not happen, the reaction darkened into ...”

“... the aura of a religious relic. (For years it was the only pre-1930 Hollywood movie – save Cecil B. DeMille’s King of Kings – regularly shown on American commercial television.) As such, it opens on a mournful note. To the accompaniment of a plaintive pseudo-semitic melody, a series of intertitles identifies the Jews as ‘a race older than ...”

“... his younger brother Hamo at Gallipoli and his beloved ‘poor Tommy’, his fellow Welch Fusilier David Thomas – nourished his Homeric rage, which, in a uniquely Sassoonian way, led him to take the whole burden of war on himself as a kind of cosmic personal insult:I want to smash someone’s skull; I want to have a scrap and get out of the war for a bit or ...”

“... farmers who sold up and took what capital they could with them. ‘From the famine onwards,’ David Fitzpatrick writes, ‘male and female emigrants were quite evenly balanced. Boys and girls alike swarmed out of every parish, every social stratum, and almost every household, systematically thinning out the fabric of Irish society.’About a million ...”

“... Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset ...”

“... followed: in San Francisco (Ulysses Grant among others), Bristol (Edward Colston) and Cape Town (Cecil Rhodes). For BLM and many others, it was clear that the West was defending its own ritual statuary while failing to relinquish sacred artefacts lifted from Africa during the colonial era. Some institutions – perhaps to their relief – have their hands ...”

“... of behaviour. We all did then, they sat on bookshop shelves like a university course: Laing, David Stafford-Clark, Erving Goffman, Vance Packard, Michael Argyle, C.J. Adcock, Viktor Frankl. And more and more. They were all over the house, on tables, on the floor. She bought them, I bought them, Peter and his friends bought them. Somehow they were cheap ...”

“... Objectivism is also promulgated by the Objectivist Center in Washington DC, until recently run by David Kelley, the author of A Life of One’s Own: Individualism and the Welfare State. Kelley split from the ARI in 1990, ‘dismayed’ by ‘the exploding excesses’ of its ‘official, dogmatic approach’. The Center supports lectures and social events, a ...”

“... black and white photographs that line the walls of the dining-room: Harold Wilson, Derek Nimmo, David Steel, Jeremy Irons, Clement Freud, Norman Tebbit, Barbara Castle, Elaine Paige, Cecil Parkinson, Nigel Lawson, Robin Day. It’s like being compulsorily inducted into a dinner party from hell, a nightmare mix of ...”

“... then on to Malawi and Zimbabwe, in November 1991, will underestimate the hardiness and courage of David Livingstone, who traversed, on foot, thousands of miles of bush, mountain and swamp, fearsome to behold even from the air. But Livingstone’s country had not been unknown to the Portuguese, established on both east and west coast for centuries. The term ...”

“... of the price war’s principal targets. (‘Don’t worry about the Telegraph,’ Murdoch told Sir David English of Associated Newspapers in 1993. ‘Leave them to me. I’ll put them out of business for you.’) Knowing that Black knew Murdoch socially, my friend asked him if he had ever brought up the subject of the price war. Black shook his head. He ...”

“... accept that the heroic dramas are, in their exposition of love and honour, farcical, pure Cecil B. DeMille (though Aureng-Zebe, too, or The Conquest of Granada, it would be good to see just once, for the fun of it). This speciousness or fine hollowness always touches the rest of the plays. Their steady assurance and their real intelligence can prove ...”

“... place a special atmosphere of frivolity, a capriciousness which extended even to its origin myth. Cecil B. DeMille, one of filmmaking’s Founding Fathers, recounted the saga of his California arrival to Charlton Heston, who is shoehorned into this Old Timers’ circle to tell the tale. DeMille, like so many East Coast film pioneers, went West in search of ...”

“... for a great range of thinkers, including Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams in Inventing the Future, David Graeber in Bullshit Jobs, Paul Mason in Post-Capitalism, Rutger Breman in Utopia for Realists, and Peter Barnes in With Liberty and Dividends for All. UBI is definitely having a moment.Guy Standing is a long-standing member of BIEN, the Basic Income Earth ...”

“... called Ibis. Branch Energy, too, is still in Angola. Buckingham’s men have little resemblance to Cecil Rhodes’s corporate army or to the scabrous soldiers of fortune who have wheeled in and out of Africa for the last four decades. EO is a more sophisticated force. It contracts with governments but patrols the operations of an adventurous mining concern in ...”