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“... of the House of Lords that anyone who had a high opinion of its contribution to the governance of Britain should go and have a look at it. He clearly believed that the mere sight of the so-called Upper House at work would cure any tendency towards excessive reverence. He had sound reasons for this judgment, since the outstanding feature of the Victorian House ...”

“... Rastafarians. But no less courageous is her remarkably open treatment of a theme, race in modern Britain, which for too long now has been narrowly viewed – by the white population at least – through the wrong end of two faulty telescopes: the one cracked by guilt and ideology, the other by complacency and hate. In Tales from Two Cities she writes with a ...”

“... pepper sauce. – or you find it rather embarrassing and outré. Enthusiasm is discouraged in Britain: schoolchildren are told not to be big-headed and taught to be very careful about using exclamation marks in their stories and essays (Walcott, of course, spikes his text with them – ‘and that is/their bounty!’, ‘come on ...”

“... or it may have something to do with everyone needing health insurance. People who read novels in Britain and Ireland generally do so on holiday from work, or on the way to work, or in bed at night, exhausted after work, or at the weekend, dreading the return to work on Monday morning; but if you were to take the protagonists of most novels published in these ...”

“... each of them crudely flavoured and differently coloured, like a tube of wine gums. Growing up in Britain in the 1950s I never heard the past, however recent, specified by decade. There was ‘the war’ and ‘before the war’, and sometimes, when my parents were burrowing into their childhoods, ‘before the first war’. The 20th century lay stacked in ...”

“... Ireland rather, as Irish nationalists insist, a relic of empire, whose close proximity to Great Britain obscures the otherwise bald fact that British colonialism is the ultimate cause of the modern Ulster Question? Both claims are valid, while neither tells the whole story. Certainly, the Northern Irish problem has its roots in a colonial project, the ...”

“... Useful stuff if you happen to be a foreigner of snobbish inclination and are thinking of visiting Britain in the Fifties. Some of these long set-piece speeches are indeed set in the Fifties, causing us to marvel at Mehta’s down-to-the-last-comma recall. Others were elicited during a research-sojourn at Balliol in 1988-9. It is not always easy to tell which ...”

“... in the highest office and in health. As minister he was best in the 1780s, when he presided over Britain’s recovery from the American War; he was good for much of the 1790s, when he initially took a calm view of the French Revolution and coped well with the tribulations invariably suffered by British politicians and generals at the onset of major ...”

“... In 1938, A.L. Rowse, who knew him at All Souls, went further, pillorying Lothian as ‘Britain’s public enemy number one’. That was over-harsh, but by then Lothian and the rest of the Cliveden group or clique were under fire in the press and elsewhere, and most of them deserved it. The origins of the so-called ‘set’ lay in Milner’s ...”

“... and David Ricardo and the slightly more contemporary figure of Theresa May, whose ambition to make Britain ‘the global leader in free trade’ Hannan quotes approvingly. Free trade is the great elixir. ‘Free trade doesn’t simply put more money into the hands of the lowest earners. It doesn’t just eliminate extreme poverty globally. It is also the ...”

“... remarkable achievement to its credit: it has made itself even more unpopular in Lebanon than in Britain. This is largely Portillo’s doing. Yesterday’s optimism turns out to have been fatuous, the product of euphoria induced by a couple of drinks on the plane. The Israeli bombardment goes on, though not in Beirut. Peres has seen too many massacres to be ...”

“... very different. There was the radio, for a start, familiarising us with the catchphrases that made Britain happy in the 1950s. Perhaps we liked them for their reliability: like milk on the doorstep, they never failed to turn up. The Glum family, the favourite segment of the Light Programme’s Take It from Here, always began in the same way. ‘Oh, Ron,’ Eth ...”

“... attack at Pearl Harbor was no more infamous than that on Port Arthur, so universally applauded in Britain and the United States, at the outset of the Russo-Japanese War in 1904. In any case, the memory of Pearl Harbor has been blotted out for the Japanese, with the connivance of Anglo-American bien-pensants, by that of Hiroshima. There was no equivalent to ...”

“... begun in 1889 and completed in the 1950s – fuelled the guerrilla struggle against the regime of Ian Smith, whose Rhodesian Front opposed black majority rule, the matter was never properly addressed when Britain came back into the picture to effect a constitutional transition to independence under majority rule. Southern ...”

“... the Army had seethed with democratic ideas. The troops elected ‘agitators’: ‘at the time,’ Ian Gentles reassures his readers, ‘the word “agitator” had none of its modern pejorative ring, and meant simply one who had been empowered to act on behalf of others.’ There was, however, nothing remotely ‘simple’ about such a proposition. The idea ...”