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“... me she would be happy and well cared for as his second wife in Araouane, an oasis 250 kilometres north of Timbuktu, where she would join his first wife as an honoured member of the extended family. Timbuktu itself would not be a good place for her to stay, he explained, because in Timbuktu all women eventually become bandy-legged – which I assumed was an ...”

“... Farley’s 1783 edition of Domesday Book published by Phillimore under the general editorship of John Morris, as part of their ‘History from the Sources’ series. This was put in hand in 1969 and the first parts were published in 1975; the work was delayed by Dr Morris’s death in 1977. This now-completed edition, which includes a supplementary-volume ...”

“... Pilgrim Edition of Dickens’s letters, was launched in the optimistic Sixties (the late John Butt was associated with both initiatives). As in previous volumes, about half the letters (here they number 247) are hitherto unpublished, and of the rest many are now published for the first time in their full form. There are the inevitable routine and ...”

“... claim to be remembered for his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are ...”

“... house, or Perilous; when flocks of geese rise, month-long, from the fields and arc towards the north I say I’ll drown my books and start again, for no one’s sake, a heartbeat at a time. My mother is a day’s walk in the rain, waiting for someone to come with pear drops and nylons; my father is a gun beyond the hill, his shirt sleeves stitched and ...”

“... turning and pausing, turning then pausing. Eventually, like a compass needle settling on magnetic North, she quivers to a halt and scurries for the exit. The court ushers and list-callers, underlings in the Byzantine hierarchy of the Inner London Magistrates’ Court Service, unlock the courtrooms and the lawyers and unrepresented defendants swarm around them ...”

“... the first volume of what was to become Compton Mackenzie’s quadrilogy, The East, West, South and North Winds of Love. I embarked on it with hope and confidence, but after only a few pages had to give up and turn for entertainment to the medical book. Considering myself a mature and experienced reader, I was much chagrined at this and confessed my defeat to ...”

“... displayed in the IRA shop window is an essential one. It is certainly true that Sinn Fein, in the North, and to some degree in the South as well (their representative in a recent parliamentary by-election secured 6 per cent of the vote), have now embarked with gusto on a campaign of supposed community service, setting up clinics and advice centres to assist ...”

“... as yet, we have to draw the salamander, aching for the fire, and guess the leopard, as it journeys north, erased in the long atonement of desire. The Heatwave It’s mid-July: the plum tree has turned to glass in your neighbour’s yard, the fish in the pool are dreaming mercury. Everything hangs: your garden’s a delicate balance of frogs and snails and all ...”

“... in a tradition of Scottish eccentricity that includes James Hogg’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, John Galt’s ‘theoretical histories’ and Margaret Oliphant’s tales of terror. It’s common to think of Blackwood’s as a stolid redoubt of middlebrow English respectability, the kind of torpid organ invoked by Orwell in ‘England Your England’: ‘If ...”

“... John Montague’s Selected Poems reinforce the impression left by his individual volumes: that of a great talent growing increasingly apprehensive at the conditions in which it must be exercised. Since 1958, when his first volume Forms of Exile appeared, he has been renowned for a certain elegance and formality of phrasing, and for a nervous delicacy of rhythm: these bestowing upon his poems an air of fragility which has to survive the often desperate occasions which initiate them ...”

“... while the death of Elizabeth II and the recent census result, showing a Catholic majority in the North, are sure to increase unease.But loyalism has never been just one thing, and in Northern Protestants Susan McKay finds people from staunch unionist backgrounds voting Alliance and calling out sexual exploitation by community leaders, just as their ...”

“... radical as Derrida should want to publish something so mannered and so hard to follow. Some of the North American faithful objected to this review, and one, a professor of philosophy in Scranton, wrote a letter warning that I had failed not just Derrida but our whole benighted community. To wit: The signs of the Holocaust were all around but only the Madman ...”

“... on Hadrian’s Wall, and that when crisis comes and the ships of the Winged Hats attack out of the north, these troops were faithful and resolute: they ‘stood up in their padded cuirasses and did not whimper’. They must have felt the cold, poor devils, as did the two Indian Army corps, more than a hundred thousand men, stationed in Northern France during ...”

“... rather, and the tones, are those of the old artificer, the father of the tribe, Simon Dedalus, John Stanislaus Joyce. Like the violins of Cremona, Dubliners, Ulysses, Finnegans Wake are the products of a joint concern, a family undertaking. Joyce himself was frank about this. As long as he had escaped he could still be in the bosom of the family. As long ...”