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“... and a respect for tradition I filch a couple of branches from the base of a balsam poplar on the north side of Regent’s Park. The buds are hardly open and thus are briefly heavily scented. Now in a glass on the sitting-room mantelpiece they bring a flavour to the room as they have done every spring for the last forty years.Easter Saturday, 4 ...”

“... all about attracting men, though men often think it is. There is, for example, the iron rule that north of Derby no woman can wear tights on a night out. Why? How did Liz Hurley launch an entire career by wearing a dress much less extreme than many that Versace has shown on the catwalks of Milan? What happens when it goes wrong? Did Diana overdo it on ...”

“... having a go at ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, or even Molly Bloom, on her concert tours in the North of Ireland in Ulysses. They are songs of love and loss, and many of them were written while Walter and Agnes Skrine were ranching in Alberta, having moved to Canada after their marriage in 1895. The Skrines were true imperialists: Canada was as much their ...”

“... year later, which cost the lives of around ten thousand men for nothing, but which a furious Queen Elizabeth ensured was hushed up.What is incontestable is that over the years the British navy really did achieve the mastery of the seas of which it had so long boasted. With new financial resilience, it began to grasp the techniques that made it possible to keep ...”

“... woman … In the characterisation of women, the male novelists of those years wrote as though Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, Becky Sharp and Emma Bovary had never been created.She describes Phuong, Fowler’s Vietnamese mistress in Greene’s The Quiet American – a novel that invokes Cyril Connolly’s dictum in Enemies of Promise about the pram in ...”

“... to Milton, as well as in these intriguing paragraphs which open Chapter 58, ‘Brit’: Steering north-eastward from the Crozetts, we fell in with vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and ...”

“... by storms at sea, Anne eventually went to bed with Henry. Jane may have been with the queen when Elizabeth was born, and when she suffered two miscarriages, but we don’t know what Jane thought about any of it. There is a dubious story that has her involved in an incident in 1535, when a group of London women gathered outside the palace at Greenwich, hoping ...”

“... playne harts doe in the faces rest; Where can wee find two better Hemispheares, Without sharpe North, without declining West? What ever dyes, was not mixt equally. If our two Loves bee One, or Thou and I Love so alike that none doe slacken, none can dye. The poem describes the erotic glow at the beginning of an affair. ‘Countrey pleasures’ contains a ...”

“... in South Carolina, Florida and near Rio de Janeiro. English navigators were eager to join in, but Elizabeth I wasn’t much interested: since England was fighting Spain, as it was from 1585 till the end of her reign, it could pinch treasure from Spanish ships rather than scratching around in foreign lands looking for gold and pearls and dodging ...”

“... Cartier-Bresson. He flirted with the idea of moving to New York, after falling in love with Sara Elizabeth Penn, a glamorous Black expatriate he met at a party. In 1957, Penn returned to New York, and waited for him to arrive.He never did. Late that year, he received a visit from Annette Roger, a doctor from Marseille who was active in the porteurs de ...”

“... don’t have the power they once did. He made it into Parliament in 2010 as Conservative MP for North East Somerset and has been there ever since, stiffening the already near-rigid sinews of the Faragist party within a party. His maiden speech in Parliament invoked ‘three great Somerset men’ as his models: Alfred the Great, ‘the first ...”

“... new few months, the Dengie Peninsula in Essex, marshland bounded by the Blackwater Estuary to the north, the River Crouch to the south and an encircling sea wall to the east, became a favourite haunt. These expanses of green are now mostly wind farm or vineyard. At the outer tip of the peninsula, the seventh-century chapel of St-Peter-on-the-Wall, built on ...”

“... months of hiding, to believe that their powerful tormentors had really been killed. The roads north filled these vacuums. They were, for miles and miles, rich with the physical realities of war, glutted with evidence of slaughter and victory. They become the great circuit board of the Gulf War, where the disconnectedness stopped. Kelly is talking here ...”

“... way, comrades would remember him reading Dostoevsky while ‘on the run’ in the mountains of north Munster.) He featured in a number of celebrated Civil War incidents, and was finally captured in a shoot-out in Ailesbury Road, the heart of Dublin’s haut-bourgeois enclave. He brought mayhem into unlikely and unsettling places, and was already at odds ...”

“... accept completely this empirical account of Italy, and of the tensions and inequalities between north and south. The application of a similar kind of dialectical analysis to Britain, however, is still considered, in traditional university circles, to be a matter more of beards and leather jackets than of serious academic discourse. In order to deal with the ...”