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“... by the phrase ‘stage army of the good’. A moon-faced vicar or two, talking about giving peace a chance. A self-satisfied Labour councillor wearing a CND badge. John Berger, the star guest, putting his usual spin on the dishonest line of the Communist Party. No doubt there was a resolution to send a telegram to Downing Street. There was also, I dare ...”

“... few motor-cars, there were few people.’ (Cyril Connolly hadn’t yet got there.) And Elizabeth David herself couldn’t have found fault with the food. Her mother for the time being was calm, a pleasure to be with. ‘So there we sat Chez Schwob, my mother and I, sun-warmed, looking at the sea and tossing boats, drinking a modest apéritif ...’ It’s ...”

“... writing has a lyrical passion in argument that I found irresistible,’ says no less a judge than David Malouf. ‘I couldn’t put it down.’ Malouf being no fool, I am reluctant to suggest that the reason he couldn’t put the book down was that it is so full of hot air it kept springing back up again. Reluctant, but compelled. Lyrically passionate writing ...”

“... Cornwall, holding most of the major public offices: county councillor, alderman, Justice of the Peace and ultimately Mayor of Fowey. His knighthood had been awarded primarily for political activity. On his return to Fowey from the investiture, the town brass band immediately registered a sense of professorial potential by playing ‘He’s A Fine Old ...”

“... scatology a subversive weapon. Sometimes Newton’s pleasure seems merely ‘schoolboyish’ – David Alexander’s word – because what Crowninshield would later call the ‘grossness and somewhat fat overstatement’ overwhelm any political point. Not so, however, when Newton shows Napoleon Establishing French Quarters in Italy by having the Pope kiss ...”

“... possibility that some riots may be modelled on the carnival or Saturnalia, that they may be fun. David Matza claimed some years ago, in his book Delinquency and Drift, that criminologists have taken delinquency rather too seriously, casting it as the fateful pursuit of those intent on profit or a grim lawlessness. He claimed that since Frederick Thrasher ...”

“... bed fell’ and ‘The day the dam broke’. No such distressing excitements have disturbed the peace of Lake Wobegon since the New Albion College made its exit, pursued by a bear, in the late 1850s. Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country portrays a strictly contemporary America in which the characters spend much of their time playing video games, watching TV ...”

“... believe, that it is the axis of power, of history; to go from East to West means to go from war to peace, from Communism to Capitalism, from old to new, from sentiment to hygiene; it is the route of the Jews, of political and other refugees. One has only to think of the many passages in Roth that describe the sad songs of fugitives and emigrants as they huddle ...”

“... are equally visible to all of us. On my one visit to Israel, I was taken by some Israeli friends, peace-loving and generous in their attitudes, to the far north and shown the hole in the barbed wire, known as the Friendly Gate, through which, I was told with pride, Israeli doctors passed daily to work in poor Arab villages. It was at least a start, they said ...”

“... to SIS, or both. But The Climate of Treason is not one of these hagiograms. They really talked: David Footman, Nicholas Elliott, Sir Robert Mackenzie, George Carey-Foster, Sir Frederick Warner, agents and diplomats on the security side, and a large anonymous group of Intelligence men from both branches of the service, retired and active. The reason can be ...”

“... and sexual excess, as Richard Cobden put it – the Arabs were often admired for manly simplicity. David Urquhart, secretary at the embassy in Constantinople, wrote that Islam was not a false religion to be ridiculed: it taught no new dogmas, propounded no fanciful revelation and imposed no new priesthood; on the contrary, he argued in The Spirit of the East ...”

“... volumes had included many sentimental or chirpy verses, they had also contained ‘Goliath and David’, a rewriting of the story in Goliath’s favour which anticipates Graves’s many debunkings of history, from My Head, My Head! (1925) to King Jesus (1946), of which Goodbye to All That is one. In the ‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’, written ...”

“... did he seek to build bridges after winning the presidency. In an interview at the US Institute of Peace on his first trip abroad after the election, he remarked: ‘I hope you have a copy of the election results. The constituents, for example, who gave me 97 per cent [of the vote] cannot in all honesty be treated on [a par] with constituencies that gave me 5 ...”

“... as well as to their original classical setting. The figures wait – for the doctor, for food, for peace. A columnar tree cuts across ashlar. Greys tending to lilac, mauve and olive green set off the plain white bowls of the orphans and the clean bandages of the wounded. The glowing oil lamp in the foreground and the sash window illuminated in the sober ...”

“... dat animum (‘It is the holy love of the fatherland which moves us’). Half a century ago, Dom David Knowles, doyen of humane medievalism, hailed the MGH among the ‘great historical enterprises’, which it certainly was (and is) despite its original nationalist agenda. Medievalist Wissenschaft (the term has scientific connotations largely absent from ...”