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“... men and women my colleagues and I would train. We would win, without the sherry or the Trinity Ball or the Elizabethan Society. McDowell and Webb think well of Trinity, and why not? They are so closely identified with the College that to think well of it means to think well of themselves – a natural pleasure. From time to time they lament the fact that ...”

“... doors sometime back, the noticeboard was taken down. That noticeboard is behind a poem ‘Spot the ball’ which Frank Ormsby wrote in the Seventies: We persevere from habit. When we try These days our hope’s mechanical, we trust To accident. We are selective No longer, the full hundred crosses Filling the sky. It was Craig Raine who pointed out that this ...”

“... receive as much notoriety, but I would rather see my garbage gone than see some cat hit a ball 500 feet. And I would much rather not sing for a month than not go to the bathroom for a month.’I like to think Marx would have approved of this downhome explanation of the labour theory of value, and the last few weeks have provided an unusually cogent ...”

“... posed by Swift’s satire? Are the Houyhnhnms exemplary models of harmonious civility or – as George Orwell thought – robotic proto-fascists? Do the bestial Yahoos embody Swift’s ideas about human depravity, or does he also integrate, in what’s sometimes called the ‘soft’ reading of Gulliver’s Travels, the tools to allow us to escape the ...”

“... to trade with Russia came up against the Soviet determination to infiltrate their agents. Lloyd George behaved with admirable sangfroid – so it is no surprise that that archintriguer and hater of politicians, Henry Wilson, should enquire in his diary: ‘Is Lloyd George a traitor?’ In the end, Lloyd ...”

“... not even Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne, Correggio’s Madonna of the Basket or Tintoretto’s St George and the Dragon, which were among the National Gallery’s most remarkable recent acquisitions. Dickens was certainly familiar with the paintings of Charles Eastlake, the keeper of the National Gallery between 1843 and 1847. Eastlake was the leading British ...”

“... on benches, men without colour sit apart from one another in silence. A girl bounces a fat ball on the cement over and over and over. The wind is freshening and the sloped light is turning gold. Birds speak with each other in the hushed leaves and in the wind there are the soft calls of children, but these noises are blown by the wind and are finally ...”

“... or mixture, of music with discoursing, sound with sense, poetry with thought’. George Bornstein, in a recent book of essays on ‘post-romantic poetic development’ which has clear affinities with both Woolford’s and Tucker’s projects, devotes one essay to the arrangement of Dramatic Lyrics as a collection which ‘displays ...”

“... who have been responsible for swelling the canon. We start with the Scottish man of letters George Chalmers in 1790, and end up with Professor J.R. Moore of Indiana University, whose principal work extended from the 1930s to the 1960s. We learn of William Lee, sanitary reformer and colleague of Edwin Chadwick, who found his match in the equally ...”

“... Romans. Quite recently Lucius Quinctius had been popular in America, too. True, it had taken George Washington more than two weeks on the job, and he had not exactly returned to the plough. But he did not make himself into a bloodthirsty despot either, or set up in the throne business against George III. Hence ...”

“... kind before the war and I could not help referring to it afterwards as the Duchess of Richmond’s Ball.’ Sacha Guitry was to appear with Seymour Hicks in a not very funny sketch they had written, adorned but not improved by Guitry’s latest wife, Genevieve Sereville, an extremely pretty girl. ‘At rehearsal Mlle Sereville was dressed in a very short skirt ...”

“... was in the middle of a recession and Parliament didn’t spend much time on Crossrail. As Sir George Young, the MP for Ealing (and Leader of the House from 2010 until Cameron’s recent reshuffle), put it, ‘the report is conducted in a financial vacuum.’ Young joked that, since Barran’s Crossrail tunnel passed under Buckingham Palace, the queen ...”

“... programme in years may be seriously underestimating the situation and the gravity of the threat. George Bush, November 1990 He tried [12 years ago] to develop a programme – an upgraded Oak Ridge [enrichment] facility in Iraq. Of course he couldn’t. It is too complex for Iraqi science or technology. Khidhir Hamza, June 2002 There may be good reasons ...”

“... gawping out-of-town tourist an easy mark for a pickpocket. In Covent Garden, two centuries before George Young described the homeless as ‘the people you step over when you come out of the opera’, departing audiences were picking their way through prostitutes and cabbage leaves left over from the market. Shortly after Trafalgar Square was created in the ...”

“... and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.’ Of his friend the dotty scholar George Dyer: ‘With long poring, he is grown almost into a book. He stood as passive as one by the side of the old shelves. I longed to new coat him in russia, and assign him to his place.’ In a marvellous vignette, Lamb makes a ‘sentiment’ – an English ...”