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“... and British governments have been ‘overthrown by seaborne invasion at least nine times since the Norman Conquest, in 1139, 1153, 1326, 1399, 1460, 1470, 1471, 1485 and 1688’. There were also plenty of near misses, such as when Louis, the French Dauphin, was offered the English throne after King John’s death and was cheered through the streets of London ...”

“... Dylan Thomas, Edwin Morgan, R.S. Thomas, Iain Crichton Smith, Thom Gunn, Hugh MacDiarmid and Norman MacCaig are unassailably part of our consciousness of the poetic landscape. Auden and MacNeice, too, though the omission in both books of Stephen Spender suggests that he has slipped out of contention – either because his true worth has yet to be ...”

“... or of Manhattan, Hannah and her Sisters and Husbands and Wives. All in the Family: as Edward Said has noticed, ‘childless couples, orphaned children, aborted childbirths, and unregenerately celibate men and women populate the world of high modernism with remarkable insistence.’ If, in privileging affiliation over kinship, the Beauvoir-Sartre ...”

“... about the language of architecture; exactness and detail v. mood and feeling. Betjeman wrote to Norman Scarfe to praise his ‘magnificent’ book on Suffolk’s landscape and its history, and each sentence is an attack on Pevsner. ‘You write beautifully. You inform without dehumanising. There is not a hint of art history, thank God, but love of the ...”

“... our man is still scanning the horizon for nay-saying natives. To the not-entirely-lovely Norman Podhoretz, then editor of Commentary, who had presumably just asked Bellow for a piece: ‘And now tell me this: If you were described in someone’s magazine as a “burnt-out case” would you be at all inclined to contribute articles to that ...”

“... Mumford & Sons, the Americana string band Old Crow Medicine Show and alt-rock hipsters Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros as they travelled together by train from Oakland in California, ending up in New Orleans with an inevitable hootenanny-style rendition of ‘This Train Is Bound for Glory’. The song is actually an old gospel ...”

“... and constitution and imposing their own candidate as head of state, the British, under General Edward Spears, forced a complete reversal. In both cases Paris suspected Britain of trying to ensure that the Union Jack would fly over the entire Levant. De Gaulle raged at the British ambassador, threatened to declare war and accused Britain of unforgivable ...”

“... a single stray aside, seems to be that for Runciman the royal administrations of Hammurapi and of Edward the Confessor exceeded those of a patrimonial ruler. This is scarcely persuasive. Was the staff at the disposal of Henry VII, or the House of Avis, really less? Patrimonialism, one is forced to conclude, the least anchored of modes in the subjacent ...”

“... his youth among a generation of thrawn poets with their country expansiveness: I’m thinking of Norman MacCaig in his Assynt mode; Iain Crichton Smith of the Highlands; George Mackay Brown in his Orkney remoteness; and Hugh MacDiarmid, always in among the fields and dykes, metaphysical or real. None of these men gave much quarter, and, next to them, Morgan ...”

“... are perched on pediments that are in fact breasts (nipple downwards). The memorial tablet to Edward Harman, Henry VIII’s doctor, is even more extraordinary, with figures in relief which are among the first representations of Native Americans but which seem less of the 16th than the early 20th century and which could well be mistaken for sculptures by ...”

“... he himself had been moulded. Neither parent could get on with their eldest son, Bertie, the future Edward VII, who was not mouldable. He tried hard but had, as his mother put it, a ‘small empty brain’ and persistent discouragement and criticism made him unhappy and rebellious. He was growing up to be a worry and a disappointment. Towards the end of the ...”

“... the Anglo-Saxon from the fifth century on, the Norse in the ninth and tenth centuries, and the Norman Conquest of 1066. The last of these had surprisingly little immediate effect on the language, though it did set up the conditions for major borrowing from French later on. The Scandinavian takeover of several counties in the North and the Midlands caused ...”

“... Had It So Good, the first volume of his monumental history of Britain since 1956, big guns like Norman Tebbit continued to lambast ‘the insufferable, smug, sanctimonious, naive, guilt-ridden, wet, pink orthodoxy of that sunset home of the third-rate minds of that third-rate decade, the 1960s’. Three years later, Thatcher blamed the 1960s for ‘“the ...”

“... a bestseller published to considerable critical acclaim, The Adventures of Augie March. Though Norman Podhoretz complained that it was marred by a ‘willed buoyancy’, it was extravagantly praised by more senior and noteworthy critics, including Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe and Leslie Fiedler. In the novel’s memorable first sentence, it is possible to ...”