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“... exemplified in The Great Gatsby. Gatsby is the ideal person to be talked about, and Nick Carraway, Scott Fitzgerald’s narrator, come to New York from the Middle West, can both identify with Gatsby as a figure of mystery and charm, and also consider him objectively as a focus for speculation. Gossip and speculation go together. Anthony Powell’s ...”

“... full version of the term, which has puzzled everybody, unduly I think. According to Liddell and Scott, the Greek ‘alektwr means ‘cock’, keraV, ‘horn’, ‘areskw, ‘to please’, and tauroV, of course, ‘bull’: hence the phrase means roughly ‘a horny cock pleasing to a bull’, reduced to ‘halek’ = ‘cock’. Forman’s Greek was ...”

“... In​ 1993 the soothsayer John Major advised that fifty years hence Britain ‘will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers’. Still? That suggests these properties were extant in 1993. And maybe they were, somewhere. The optimist premier equated country with county, with his native patch, Surrey, where the past is never dead but constantly honoured in reproductions of varying degrees of happy bogusness ...”

“... for ‘When will my people be free?’‘For Scots with mixed [English and Scottish] parentage,’ John Lloyd wrote in the Financial Times in 2012, ‘a forced choice is uncomfortable. Should we, on the model of American blacks, claim “blackness” – or in this case Scottishness – as our dominant identity?’ Lloyd was not alone in feeling that his ...”

“... is among the wonders of English poetry, comparable only to that of his greatest poetic hero, John Keats, who inevitably features in the list of luminaries with whom Owen compares Sassoon in a particularly excessive epistolary tribute:Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome little knocker on your door, I held you as Keats ...”

“... John Taylor, the journalist, newspaper editor and poet, was born in 1757. His grandfather, the legendary ‘Chevalier’ Taylor, had been oculist to George II, and afterwards, so his grandson assures us, to ‘every crowned head in Europe’. He was as famous for his womanising as for his knowledge of ophthalmology, but most famous, perhaps, for his habit of prefacing every operation he performed with a long speech in praise of his own skill, composed in what he claimed was ‘the true Ciceronian’, with each main verb cunningly held back to the end of the sentence ...”

“... had for so long been reading about. The French made a nuisance of themselves by following Walter Scott in the street, demanding to be allowed to draw him. But they were disappointed by British art, and of the modern buildings Defauconpret could only mutter: ‘des briques, des briques et toujours des briques.’ The Germans, however, were noted for being ...”

“... lotion and so on and on – iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic Toby jug … They anticipate John Grindrod’s Weltanschauung. There is very little he sees that can’t have ‘iconic’ attached to it. As he wanders through the places created in the nearly five decades since Thatcher decreed the right to buy he finds the iconic everywhere. He sees it ...”

“... imagination to adventure into newness.’ In seminars, students asked about the relevance of Scott Peck to Jane Austen, and posed New Age questions on the courtship rituals of Pride and Prejudice: ‘Suppose Elizabeth Bennet said to her parents: “I’ve found a life partner I really love, and she’s a woman”?’ Though I had asked for a modern ...”

“... not only the wearer but the beholder with pride and patriotism? Questions like these sprout from Scott Hughes Myerly’s earnest foray into military aesthetics. There have been innumerable books about army uniforms and traditions, but Myerly, an American cultural and military historian, is concerned also with the impact on society of military spectacle and ...”

“... specialises in strip-searching delinquent Mexican males, but finds true love in the arms of Big John, a massively-endowed black drug-pusher. There are riots and burning in the barrios, a fixed election, a major kidnapping, and a good old American assassination by a ‘lone crazed killer’ who keeps a picture of Jodie Foster in his drawer. ‘You can always ...”

“... the dark gentleman ever to speak of it, but it bears a resemblance to that of Queen Victoria and John Brown, her favourite ghillie. Barbara Cartland, of course, could have made something of it. She was very pre-Oprah, and pre-Diana (her step-granddaughter), in believing it quite jolly for gels to be independent and bolters and all that, so long as they ...”

“... out to tell the little-known story of Official republicanism for the first time. Brian Hanley and Scott Millar start with the appointment of Cathal Goulding as IRA chief of staff in 1962. A childhood friend of Brendan Behan, Goulding was about to turn 40 and had spent much of his adult life in Irish and British jails. He was to pick up the pieces after the ...”

“... numbers, and was accustomed to make confident statements entirely without adequate data.’ So John Wyclif’s claim in the 1370s that Oxford had once had 60,000 students but that after the Black Death the number had fallen to fewer than 3000 can be confidently dismissed. The estimate of 98,000 post-invasion excess deaths in Iraq, made by Les Roberts and ...”

“... Could he find any of these people, we asked? Yes, he would try. The following week Jo Mennel and John Morgan, the reporter, went back to interview the Rhyl witnesses on camera. Over a cup of tea in a café, Terry Evans gave them the disappointing news that he could not find the main man he was looking for, a newspaper-seller called Charlie Jones. As the ...”