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“... merchant vessel called the Duc de Duras; that it was loaned to the fledgling US navy; and that it took part in the War of Independence. I know it was 152 feet long, weighed 998 tonnes and carried 42 guns. But at the time this replica was created in 1975, I knew only that it was my dad’s obsession. My brother recalls trips to a timber merchant and a ...”

“... thing, start doing poetry and prose that is nothing but ‘poetry’ and ‘prose’. This is what John Fuller’s new rhymes for children are: they announce their literariness and children can no doubt admire it, for in this context they know, like older readers on the poetry scene, what is proper to it. But Walter de la Mare’s line ‘Who said, “Peacock ...”

“... literature are published now. The theoretical essays will come out next May. Born in 1928, Miller took his first degree in science. He converted to literature as a graduate and was steeped in New Criticism during its most doctrinaire phase. He describes his emancipation from its discipline as something comparable to Dorothea’s loss of her provincial ...”

“... seen had often been in evidence during the previous two years as the opposition to Boris Yeltsin took shape. The Soviet flag was in the majority: plain red (no need for a variety of colours to represent different strands in the nation – this was a Union in which all contradictions, colourful or otherwise, had been resolved) with the little hammer and ...”

“... a diminutive. ‘Pavlik’, another diminutive, was never used until the Komsomol press took it up. When Druzhnikov pointed out obvious contradictions between what they had experienced and the official version, interviewees often said that their own memory must be at fault. Pavlik’s mother, who was still alive in the early Eighties and living in ...”

“... Jaguars and BMWs were the favourite cars on an island that measures nine miles by five. I took a job in a trust and company administration business, where I had to follow instructions faxed daily from banks and law firms across the world. This was a world of smoke and mirrors, in which a Jersey registered company might be owned by a trust based in ...”

“... on the environment and social structure of Chile is enormous. Inspired by this example I took a look around my local Asda and found fresh Brazilian sirloin at £2.96 for a 250g steak. Let’s parse that price. Beef cattle are usually between one and two years old. So that cow was raised and fed for (say) 18 ...”

“... were supported by the Whigs. Indeed, the subsequent formation of the Liberal Party, though it took twenty years of faltering manoeuvres to accomplish, entailed a Parliamentary union between Peelites like Gladstone and Whigs like Lord John Russell. The Gladstonian Liberal Party, which was to dominate Victorian ...”

“... Sir John Low​ finally hung up his helmet seventy years after joining the Madras army in 1804, having served the East India Company as soldier, jailer, agent and councillor. As a rookie lieutenant, his regiment mopped up in Mysore when the British took over the old kingdom of Tipu Sultan ...”

“... told you his heart bled for his country ‘felt no uneasy sensation’. Bards in heroic households took their function as a matter of course, not as one of personal feeling; and though England before the war was far from heroic, Barker borrowed the proper visionary accents, seeing the ghosts of Blake and others, crying out from the past. Alone on the dark ...”

“... critics, like Maurice Morgann in 1777 with his Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff. A cheerful legally-minded diplomatist and civil servant, Morgann did what I suppose no good judge or defence counsel should do: he first fell for the plaintiff – fell virtually in love with him indeed – and then undertook to defend him in court ...”

“... and Fifties, which crammed the poet’s memory circuits, was receding into history as A Furnace took shape in his notebooks. That sense of living through a period of change was formative as well as enabling. Fisher’s Modernist allegiances have generally made his work more spatial than historical in reach, but A Furnace makes room in its spiralling ...”

“... enhanced. McDowell’s peacocks are frequently dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, from Don John of Austria to the ‘tartan cowboy’, and he understates the sexual electricity of the uncoloured Victorian period – of the black and grey peacocks of the high 19th century. He prefers to think about cavalry officers and suggests that their bright colours ...”

“... to merit; the ancient universities opened up to Nonconformists and agnostics. The bourgeoisie took advantage of the opportunities thus created and became a pillar of the establishment. They switched to careers in government service and education; sent their sons to public schools and Oxbridge; patronised the arts and the London Season; and propounded ...”

“... tricks of scale, luminosity and outline to make his sitters loom large within their frames. He took his cue from the Dutch followers of Caravaggio – the so-called Utrecht Caravaggisti, such as Gerrit van Honthorst and Dirck van Baburen – who lent presence to their figures through dramatic use of light and shade. The turbaned man’s features are ...”