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“... in these ventutes. ‘Our modern world of high finance and international banking,’ writes Sir John Quinton, Chairman of Barclays, in the Constable catalogue, ‘shows a proper concern for all aspects of our environment, but especially for the countryside.’ Wow. It’s hard to say what is more extraordinary, the statement itself – which exonerates the ...”

“... the National Curriculum, one of which suggests 1066 and All That as the appropriate textbook for a John MacGregor version of the history syllabus; another (mainly) on visiting heritage sites, which seems to belong to the first volume; another (mainly) on the politics of Britain in the Eighties, including two pleasingly irritable essays from 1982 on the ...”

“... one small but intriguing respect, the terrain was a factor: the chalk of the Downs, both South and North, proved better stuff to pitch a wicket on in the days when all the bowling was done underarm, because the ball bounced higher from the chalk than it did off the dull clay of the Weald, where scuttling grubbers may well have been a bowler’s standby and a ...”

“... somehow to mud or honey. The most significant point of the compass in Thirties poetry was North (hence Letters from Iceland); in Northern Irish poetry the compasshand of significance has wavered between North and West. Pauline Stainer’s The Ice-Pilot Speaks, like Seamus Heaney’s ...”

“... Trading into Hudson’s Bay controlled around a million square miles of territory in British North America, with trading rights that extended to the Pacific. It persuaded Indigenous trappers to swap beaver pelts for firearms and tobacco, drawing them into transatlantic capitalism. In the first two-thirds of the 18th century alone, trappers provided the ...”

“... things will happen as long as there are remnants of old empires in the Western hemisphere? That North Americans, always too trusting and too kind, need to get a little tougher? ‘Remember the Maine, to hell with Spain’ was the complete couplet, printed in William Randolph Hearst’s New York journal on 18 February. This was not a new sentiment in the ...”

“... it with phosphorus and calcium, to the detriment of rare alpine plants.A delicate issue. The John Muir Trust and the other owners of the land around Ben Nevis have constructed a ‘Memorial Site for Contemplation’ at the foot of the mountain, and are removing the memorials from the open hill. As for ashes, well, the Nevis Partnership says: try throwing ...”

“... more famous than the lyrics. Then in the 19th century an otherwise obscure genre painter called John Watson Nicol (1856-1926) gave the same name to his only famous picture. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1883, Nicol’s Lochaber No More depicts a miserable farewell to the Highlands. A man with a heavy plaid around his shoulders stands at a ship’s rail ...”

“... John Wieners​ once told his nephew he had met the Virgin Mary. ‘Did she say anything to you?’ Walter asked. ‘No,’ John said, ‘she doesn’t know how to speak.’ He paused. ‘But she’s learning.’ Wieners was born to a working-class family outside Boston in 1934, educated by Jesuits, and spent formative periods of his youth in New York, San Francisco and Black Mountain, North Carolina ...”

“... were victims. Her party has spent years comparing the reprisals against fascists and others in north-east Italy in 1943-45 as equivalent to the Shoah.Last year, ‘commemorating’ those killed in the Fosse Ardeatine massacre in Rome in March 1944, when 335 men were shot by the Nazis, Meloni claimed that they died because they were Italian. In fact, nine ...”

“... man without heroes is the second volume of Power’s projected trilogy entitled ‘Children of the North’. Out of the north – to reverse an old Gaelic saying – comes the utmost despair. The Power novels are set in Belfast, but a Belfast deprived of every feature that gives it its character. As in the ordinary ...”

“... of England’s own ancien régime. Mount Henneth’s satirical reflections on warmongering in North America show his sympathies to have been wholly with the colonists, curtly informed by the colonial power that no more is demanded of them than ‘implicit obedience – unconditional submission – and your money’. Nor was the satire he directed at the ...”

“... without risk, the attractions of a Tory leader who grew up in an iron-ore town on Quebec’s north shore and had a popular touch in either language. For many people, however, it was the stink of the pigs in the trough which finally did the Liberals in. Trudeau, ever the master of the contemptuous parting gesture, had forced his successor, ...”

“... John Franklin (1786-1847) was the most famous vanisher of the Victorian era. He joined the Navy as a midshipman at the age of 14, and fought in the battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar. When peace with the French broke out, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to solving the conundrum of the Northwest Passage, the mythical clear-water route which would, if it existed, link the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans above the northern coast of the American continent ...”

“... easier to engage them for sittings while living on the estate of his patrons, the Castaings, just north of Chartres, where at the same time he was painting a peasant woman as Rembrandt’s wife. Frank Auerbach once expressed his admiration for the ‘poverty’ of Soutine’s paintings. Whatever the identity of the sitters, it was Soutine’s great ...”