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“... ideal situation, with the lavender bank just coming into bloom and the trees and grass fresh and green after a week or two of rain. It’s one of the perfect places of the earth, utterly silent and private, the twitter of a hawk the only sound. And it’s the last time we shall be able to come. It’s a warm afternoon and with no one around I swim dutifully ...”

“... it with a new legal category of irrebuttable adjudicative error. This is a step beyond the ‘Henry VIII’ clauses by which Parliament has over many years devolved to ministers the power to amend primary legislation, and which a former Chief Justice, Lord Hewart, earlier this century characterised as the use of a dispensing power familiar to the Stuart ...”

“... the woman he has come to kill as no better than ‘a salvatory’ (or ointment box) filled with ‘green mummy’ – as though, like the corpses of condemned criminals, hers would soon be made available as a source of balm. Editors’ notes to these passages seldom offer any more elaborate gloss than ‘medicine made from corpses’, as though this were ...”

“... or the lives they lived and the causes they espoused. The three of these who stand out most are Henry Morton Stanley, who explored the route, the novelist Joseph Conrad, and the Irish patriot and human rights activist Roger Casement. It was Casement and a Frenchman living in England, E.D. Morel, who first drew attention to the crimes committed in the Congo ...”

“... George Baroli and I were soaked to the skin. We sat on a wooden bench in the rain, a green bottle of sherry sat between us. George stared straight ahead most of the time, tilting the bottle up to his mouth with both hands, getting it into position, holding it there, and breathing through his nose. I tried to roll him a cigarette inside my jacket while he spoke of Newcastle, of how he thought he’d never leave it, and then telling me stories of his life now, as a beggar in London ...”

“... Nicaragua. George Bush recruited Manuel Noriega to the CIA. As the Watergate hounds closed in, Henry Kissinger was implored to sink to his Jewish knees and join Richard Nixon in prayer on the Oval Office carpet, and complied. Klaus Barbie was plucked from the SS ‘Most Wanted’ list and, with many of his confrères, given a second career in American ...”

“... privilege, the satisfaction and desolation of being included without belonging. Freddie Green, the first-person narrator in the first section of The Sparsholt Affair, differs from his predecessors in not being gay. Even so, he seems a special case of heterosexual for 1940. He describes his fellow undergraduates’ assessment of a young man, ‘a ...”

“... against the barbarities of Zhdanov but equally to be wielded against Hollywood, advertising and Henry Luce. Even the post-war Partisan Review symposium ‘Our Country and Our Culture’, which in 1952 elected to celebrate, as the use of the possessive might indicate, a more rounded and reconciled view of America on the part of the intellectuals, was shot ...”

“... these are as marvellously implausible as, for example, the expression ‘in fine’ – perhaps Henry James might be a candidate if we accepted that criterion. F. Bastian, in his book on Defoe’s early life, makes attributions on the basis of (inter alia) certain ‘Defoisms’ which turn out to include tags such as hinc illae lachrymae. Such items of ...”

“... the films. In which case, why do they say ‘lovely’ and pass by? Why do they not cry out that Henry James is much more? Even that there is distress, irony, doubt and mystery in the voice of E.M. Forster that these films miss? Thomson’s anti-middlebrow fervour also seems to me to come into play in the contrast between his distaste for John Ford and his ...”

“... an evocative jacket illustration. Pink clouds portending passion and doom mass over a pleasantly green West Riding landscape, while a man and a woman, with their backs turned, contemplate the view over a workmanlike stretch of dry-stonewalling. It seems fair enough to take the dry-stonewalling as a complimentary metaphor for John Braine’s craft. The Two of ...”

“... tyrant posing for writers as frequently as Napoleon sat for painters: all laurels and a branch of green olive. Per festeggiare il suvenire d’un grand uomo, as Beethoven wrote – but then he erased it. This pièce de resistance (not by Beethoven precisely) is called ‘My Twenty Hours with Graham Greene in Havana’. In it Garcia Marquez gleefully tells us ...”

“... with painful photographs of urban poverty in Wales, Newcastle, Coatbridge, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, Stepney, Poplar, St Pancras and Durham (there’s not a single photograph of Wigan): to counteract Orwell’s odd views. Before The Road to Wigan Pier was published, Orwell was in Spain, on the second of his journeys of ‘political’ enlightenment. There ...”

“... in the 1790s to seize Haiti were eventually sent packing by malaria and yellow fever, and General Henry Clinton’s ‘southern strategy’ in the War of American Independence met with disaster: two-thirds of the British forces in the Carolinas were laid low by the ‘fevers and agues’ – malaria and yellow fever in particular – transmitted by ...”

“... still road-dazed and masato-dizzy, to a stall of native crafts: bracelets, necklaces, bright green miniature parrots. Farne opted for a bracelet made from coffee beans. I chose a parrot whistle. Later we were told that these goods were mass-produced elsewhere and delivered to all the settlements. Now Lucho’s companion, Beliza, travelling with her ...”