“... for the next attempt to regenerate national pride. The early omens weren’t good. Weight picks up John O’Farrell’s story about her election as Conservative Party leader in 1976, when she appeared in front of the cameras and gave a ‘V’ for victory sign the wrong way round. ‘She was smiling and telling the British people to fuck off at the same ...”

“... stick.But​ Penney was answerable to the American in charge of the Anzio operation, Major General John Lucas, who answered to the American Lieutenant General Mark Clark (whose troops nicknamed him Marcus Aurelius Clarkus for the Roman imperial hauteur of his manner), who answered to the British General Sir Harold Alexander, who answered to Winston ...”

“... Lawrence on the Revelation which was vouchsafed to the biblical John of Patmos? Those who know both writers can only fear the worst. Woozy metaphysics. Wild history. Blood-stained theology. Vituperation galore. Promises of chaos to come. Even more dismaying glimpses of redemption to follow. Well, one does find something of these in Lawrence’s Apocalypse ...”

“... saw as ‘dull and heavy’, Cobbett could seem to an almost eerie degree a living embodiment of John Bull. This was how James Gillray represented him at the time; and it was also how he enjoyed representing himself. He was ‘an Englishman’, he boasted in 1795, ‘a calf of John Bull’, and the older he got, the more ...”

“... needed prints of their works to spread their fame and standing. From 1829 until his death in 1837, John Constable grew increasingly preoccupied with printmaking and collaborated with the young engraver David Lucas to translate his oil sketches and paintings into 22 mezzotints, part of what would become known as English Landscape Scenery. Proofs survive, and ...”

“... against the MP Owen Paterson, and then again on 17 December, he discussed the loss of Paterson’s North Shropshire seat at the by-election necessitated by his resignation. On both occasions, Dowden insisted that what voters really wanted was for the government to ‘get on with the job’. This was an unfortunate choice of words. Jobbery – the improper use ...”

“... He affects​ the Metaphysics,’ Dryden wrote of John Donne, ‘not only in his satires, but in his Amorous Verses, where Nature alone should reign; and perplexes the Minds of the Fair Sex with nice Speculations of Philosophy, when he shou’d ingage their Hearts, and entertain them with the softnesses of Love ...”

“... its transitions.On 1 June 2020, a gathering of Black Lives Matter supporters in Lafayette Square, north of the White House, was attacked by heavily armed security forces from various federal agencies, including the US Park Police, the Bureau of Prisons Special Operations Response Teams and National Guardsmen. While dispersing the peaceful crowd to clear the ...”

“... Clement map out a distinct social territory. It lies in pockets of Hampstead and Barnes, in Oxford north of St Giles or on Boar’s Hill, where large families live in rambling old houses full of innocent laughter and fun, and favourite aunts and uncles and friends of the family come for lunch on Sunday, and amiable dogs bound about answering to clever ...”

“... the exhibition, are self-reliant, plain-living, God-fearing folk of a kind especially popular in North American art and literature. Looking at pictures such as this, we should ask ourselves whether, or rather to what extent, the character of the painting was determined by the regime which approved of it. There is a larger but less interesting selection of ...”

“... as certain as the pen-strokes of a master cartoonist.’ He was awkward to a tee. So the moment in North by Northwest when Grant puts on somebody’s else’s ill-fitting jacket epitomises his screen image. By 1959, when this film was made, Grant had spent some of his most famously ridiculous screen moments wearing clothes that were not his own: a feathery ...”

“... the political-social mind would be in accord. One of our most revered nationalist rebels, John Mitchel, may illustrate. Born about a hundred years ago, a freedom-fighter, transported to Van Diemen’s Land, escaped to America, he was honoured there until he was found to be in favour of black slavery. So, from the paper called the Citizen (New ...”

“... He died on 24 May, of cancer, at the age of 87. Mitchell was born on 27 July 1908, in Fairmont, North Carolina, a small farming community interspersed with swamps and woods, fifty miles or so inland from the Atlantic Ocean. His father was a farmer and a tobacco and cotton trader, and his ancestors on both sides had farmed land in the region since before the ...”

“... League, with the title ‘How Not to Translate Marx’. The translator he had in mind was John Broadhouse, a pseudonym for the journalist Henry Mayers Hyndman, who was notorious both for his socialism and his pronounced antisemitism (he once said of Marx’s daughter Eleanor that she ‘inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx ...”

“... the forests stretch into southern Sudan and Central African Republic. In the semi-arid plateaux of north Darfur, as the savannas fade into desert, we saw only the occasional gazelle. Hilal was a commanding figure, even in his eighties, thin, stooped and nearly blind. The Sufis – and almost all Darfurians are followers of one or another Sufi sect, mostly of ...”