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“... John Gascoigne situated Banks in the context of the English Enlightenment and the empire; Neil Chambers in 2007 contextualised Banks in the history of collecting; Patricia Fara has a rollicking go at Banks as an exploitative imperialist in Sex, Botany and Empire (2003); Banks gets a chapter to himself in Richard Holmes’s much praised The Age of ...”

“... small businesses, some of whom bought into the Brexit dream and are now living a nightmare. One day, if the Lib Dems position themselves more astutely than they have managed in recent years, it’s possible that they may be rewarded for their party’s consistent hostility to Brexit, but this will take time and some major crisis. Until then, opposition ...”

“... on my bike. I had no helmet in those days really because it made me look such a twerp. However one day a car arrived at the house and the chauffeur knocked at the door with a box so light I thought it could only be an orchid. It turns out to be a white crash helmet with a note from Dennis Stevenson saying how his son (with no helmet) had been knocked off his ...”

“... are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed,’ the novelist Neil Gunn wrote in 1935, thinking of the deserted straths in Sutherland from which his ancestors had been evicted early in the previous century. The Sutherland evictions were notorious. Between 1807 and 1821, agents acting for the Countess of Sutherland and her ...”

“... the merits of membership in order to hold her government together, Thatcher refused to name the day, or even to indicate that a time would come when she could. Doing so, she felt, would be another open invitation for speculators to target the pound. Lawson and Howe were stymied by her intransigence but realised there was little they could do about ...”

“... an inefficient, authoritarian, hypocritical and morally bankrupt administration almost since the day it took office in 1979. Its ministers have been resigning (or not resigning) in disgrace ever since its inception. The nepotism shown towards its ‘family’ of opportunistic supporters has been evident from the start but has now grown to such a level that ...”

“... down.’ Even this statement – released after several days’ pregnant silence on 21 August, the day the coup collapsed – stopped short of condemning the coup or demanding Gorbachev’s return. Perhaps a truer indication of how desperately the Party lags reality is to be glimpsed from the current (70th-birthday) issue of the Party journal, the African ...”

“... imperial territories. Hilaire Belloc’s National League for Clean Government had a field day, as did others who hated Lloyd George’s demagoguery and radicalism. After Lloyd George became prime minister in 1916, many wealthy businessmen who had benefited financially from the expanded war state received honours: more than 1800 new knights were ...”

“... in a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, and dissents by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson.* Roberts held that the admissions programmes at Harvard and UNC ran afoul of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which ...”

“... to disrupt the process, even stop up the hole with chewing gum but resist it. Another sunny warm day but with a strong wind that ruffles the lavender (and makes landing for the hornets tricky). 1 August. A propos Jeffrey Archer. I am rereading the Lyttelton Hart-Davis Letters and come across this remark by George Lyttelton: ‘Sprinters always try to beat ...”

“... was apparently untroubled by the conversion.) Barack went to a mission school run by Seventh-Day Adventists, walking three miles but, unlike his classmates, wearing shoes. His father told him: ‘I want you to go beyond where I am.’ On returning home each day, the boy was required to recite sums to his father while ...”

“... not remember that she sang all night and has to face her landlady and her fellow boarders the next day is a piece of dynamite. In a society where, as Miss Hearne says, men are gods, how do you go about dramatising them? In a society where women’s vulnerability is open and public, where women are alert to their shifting position, watchful, under the bony ...”

“... as the Social Sciences and Humanities are incorporated into the new curriculum: a series of two-day courses in market research and letter-writing skills. If management has been conquering the university in recent years, it has also found its own uses for that old totem of liberal culture known as the book. Books on management aren’t just pouring out: they ...”

“... of preaching about civility in the press. The most fatuous of the irreconcilables, Bermondsey’s Neil Coyle, took to bombarding Corbyn’s phone with late-night screeds. Andy McDonald, who served in the shadow cabinet, observes that such behaviour ‘would not be tolerated in normal workplaces’, and it was exceptional even in the fractious world of British ...”

“... hair, specs, it makes no difference. Howard is still the traditionalist, the 25 spliffs a day man. Everything up to now has been a scam, why not this autobiography? How, after so many years of abuse, could the memory deposits be trusted? Marks is that exception, the man of the Sixties who was here, there and everywhere, and who has the perfect recall ...”