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“... something the oppressed cannot afford. But there is room for humour. Certainly the West Indians in Britain offer a livelier counter-tradition at present than the Scots, who have the shade of MacDiarmid to contend with. Ron Butlin’s Ragtime in Unfamiliar Bars shows the dangers of refusing the Penny Wheep challenge: a love poetry of clouds, painted cities and ...”

“... sank and the party stagnated. Many Protestants were leaving the province to go to university in Britain, and often they did not return. Trimble’s political career began with the prorogation of Stormont by Edward Heath on 24 March 1972 – ‘I am,’ he says, ‘the product of the destruction of Stormont’ – but it was fuelled by grief and anger along ...”

“... year, in the Australian case there were apparently witnesses. One of these, the former Liberal MP Ian McLachlan, came forward to announce that he had been in the room, along with Costello, when Howard promised that he would not stay in office for more than two terms. It was McLachlan’s statement that prompted Costello to confirm that the rumours were ...”

“... of her illusions about life in the former colonial seat (Nigeria had gained independence from Britain just two years earlier, in 1960). Joining Onwordi in London, she found that her marriage was dead on arrival, notwithstanding the conception of another son on their first night together. Onwordi, who hadn’t yet passed his accountancy exams, had spent ...”

“... which they later bought, they ground out the lifestyles that were to characterise Asian life in Britain for the next twenty years. Pleasure was renounced. They worked all the double shifts and overtime slots they could grab. They pennypinched and hoarded. They rarely went out after work: they were too tight, too tired. Their broken English discouraged them ...”

“... effused one settler, ‘has ever left me with the impression of being a “whiter” man.’ Ian Smith’s Selous Scouts sustained his legend. Tidrick, however, can show that this model Rugbcian lied in order to promote the cause of white settlement and empire. In 1889 he stated, with bald falsehood, in the London press, that the high plateau of ...”

“... Spanish or Gypsy low life was bred of detestation for native ‘gentility’. On the other hand, Britain’s Imperial primacy – whose memory long outlasted its reality – inevitably encouraged dreams of daring exploits in remote lands and stirring encounters with alien peoples, without necessarily unsettling loyalty to the values of the Home Counties. The ...”

“... be wrong about that. As Thatcherism was succeeded by Blairism, he sometimes wrote bitterly about Britain’s ‘dishonoured public life’; perhaps the idea of a clean slate in the North might have appealed to him. More recently, he was aware that Scotland had changed and matured in new ways. But, to be honest, it’s more likely that he stayed in tune with ...”

“... on the wheel’. It’s rare for the now deified AD (‘probably the most intelligent detective in Britain’) to suffer public transport. He did let the train take the strain once, but that was strategic, so that he could, like John Major, boast of how he had ‘settled down to re-read Trollope’s The Way We Live Now’. Re-read! Potboilers are ...”

“... was crippled by polio, Hillary was disfigured by appalling burns received during the Battle of Britain, Wolfenden developed eye trouble during National Service). They came from provincial middle-class homes, their mothers beloved and doting, their fathers withdrawn professional men. Each in some way willed or brought about his own death: Wood threw himself ...”

“... Britain’s two leading campus novelists have long broken out of the small worlds mapped in Eating people is wrong and The British Museum is falling down. David Lodge’s latest, Paradise News, crosses at least ten time zones from Rummidge, over the Pacific Rim, to Hawaii. Doctor Criminale clocks up fewer frequent-flyer miles, but short-hauls hectically ...”

“... is the role of external broadcasting after 1945: was this an impartial news service or an arm of Britain’s soft diplomacy? During the Cold War, the Foreign Office funded and set the guidelines for the European Service’s broadcasting, while the BBC was supposed to have editorial control over content – an arrangement almost designed to cause friction. As ...”

“... American white power internationalism and American anti-communism dramatically converged. In 1965, Ian Smith’s white supremacist regime unilaterally declared Rhodesian independence from Britain, emboldened by support from across the US political establishment, from Dean Acheson to Bob Dole. When Reagan, as a presidential ...”

“... a certain sort of play. At least two artistic directors of the Royal Court (Lindsay Anderson and Ian Rickson, the present incumbent) have marked Look Back in Anger commemorations by reading out the West End listings of May 1956, which include a version of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, but largely consist of forgotten country-house ...”

“... victory in 1936 ‘carried with it the seeds of hubris’. I was reminded of a passage in Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler: ‘Hubris – that overweening arrogance which courts disaster – was inevitable. The point where nemesis takes over had been reached by 1936.’ The parallel is striking. The Führer’s spectacular success in reclaiming the ...”