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“... early 1960s it was very unusual indeed. Hecht said he had managed to ‘anger the whole of Great Britain to the remarkable point of being officially boycotted (as if I were a one-man enemy country)’, and his memoir wasn’t published in the UK. The paperback I read must have been bought by my father when he visited America.What struck me most at the time ...”

“... emigrants from the war in Europe were making their way across borders, continents and oceans. In Britain, hitchhiking established itself among the armed forces and then more widely in the years of austerity and petrol rationing that followed. It was one way of responding to appeals to the collective good and empathy with the plight of others – ‘banal ...”

“... Cranborne, meanwhile, was dealing with entreaties from Lewis Namier that German Jews be let into Britain. Cranborne thought him ‘a most tiresome person . . . he is not to be trusted. We cannot say enough to Jews of this type that people do not become refugees until they leave.’ Lyttelton, on the other hand, was in Frankfurt during Kristallnacht and saw ...”

“... physical hygiene or the route to a cure. Nineteenth-century provision of social welfare in Britain was dominated by the belief that the basic problem was not poverty but pauperism. If relief could be so organised as to be intolerable, and people would starve rather than accept it, pauperism would be lessened. This was the basic ‘less ...”

“... 70s, the country did become financially and, to some extent, politically a client of France and Britain. However, Egypt under Muhammad ‘Ali was certainly not a client state of France. Although it was then nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, it was an imperialist power in its own right. Not only had the Egyptians occupied Syria and Lebanon, but Ibrahim ...”

“... newspapers and journals (the line of influential poetry reviewing stretches from Edward Thomas to Ian Hamilton). Sooner or later, the taste which innovating literary journalists shape and enforce seeps through to institutions of higher education, which then disseminate it to their students, many of whom transmit it to the next generation of ...”

“... as the Fisher King. This is Henchman, a world-famous photographer, who has come on the round-Britain cruise on which all the characters of the story are embarked, together with his beautiful companion of the moment, Barberina Rookwood. It is not possible to take wholly seriously a character called Barberina Rookwood, and that is probably Powell’s ...”

“... appointments: the latter were all shot. Some things have changed in the interim. The prospect of Ian Paisley attaining the Attorney-Generalship which was Sir Edward Carson’s eventual pay-off is commonly agreed to be remote, but this is not the only notable point of dissimilarity between present and past. One of the most extraordinary and unexpected results ...”

“... a masterpiece is to go on trying to write very large, ambitious books. But our contemporaries in Britain don’t seem to be interested. And the second reason is a related one: readers, including reviewers, are also programmed against Major Novels. It is sometimes said that the Booker jury always has at least one man- or woman-in-the-street on it, to prevent ...”

“... of the vote, providing the first glimmerings of their possible seriousness as a political force in Britain. They then faded away, but were now contesting about 250 seats in this election. Were they keeping quiet about it, or were the media too taken up with the cut and thrust of the three main parties to report what the Greens were saying? When I went to a ...”

“... somewhat bizarrely, as ‘the city of King Edward II, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf and Sir Ian McKellen’. Houlbrook expresses this confidence when he asserts that, contrary to historical and popular orthodoxy, the postwar witch hunt of homosexual men never really happened. For decades, scholars have argued that the early 1950s saw an official ...”

“... he started from a position of strength. Kinnock’s strategy would toss all that away, or at least Britain’s chance of playing any meaningful role in the discussions. ‘Does anyone imagine that Mr Gorbachev would be prepared to talk at all if the West had already disarmed?’ she asked her audience, entirely confident of the answer. But in the event ...”

“... the port authority says. The view from Belgium is that the only place that isn’t Brexit-proof is Britain itself. Patrick McGuinness BulgariaSince the two most pressing issues for Bulgarians – EU funding and citizens’ rights – were by and large ironed out by the time of the European Commission meeting last March, Brexit news has mostly been light relief ...”

“... of violence was itself problematic, though not all of them would have been as shameless as Ian Paisley was when the first ceasefire was announced, claiming that Protestants now faced ‘the worst crisis in Ulster’s history since the setting up of the state’. Trimble puts it well in one of the many excellent speeches and articles in this ...”

“... idiocy’ and one can see what he means. Hugo Young is the best political journalist writing in Britain today, and One of Us is likely to be the standard work for quite a while to come. Some things were new to me. I hadn’t known that as Minister for Education under Heath, Mrs Thatcher had fought to preserve the Open University, or that she regretted her ...”