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“... Jehovah Brothers, who confront him about his sexuality. The intervention leads to Jesse leaving home, moving to London and abandoning his hysterical mother.But Jesse felt like an outsider in his small community long before he was outed by the Brothers. Early in the novel, a flashback illustrates the prejudice he encountered growing up as a black kid in ...”

“... to captain a county or Test side, even if he was an indifferent performer with bat or ball. Lord Hawke, who led Yorkshire to eight county championships and became England’s first official chairman of selectors, resisted the suggestion that Jack Hobbs should take over the team which was losing the Ashes with the words: ‘Pray God no professional will ...”

“... Mine is Annabel Tent. Nobody guesses it.A joke about the Queen Mother who in an old people’s home finds herself not treated with the proper respect. She approaches a nurse:QM: Don’t you know who I am?Nurse: No, dear, but if you go over and ask the lady at the desk she’ll probably be able to tell you.14 January. Most of the headlines this morning ...”

“... correspondents, Katharine Asquith and Diana Cooper: they seem to fear he might fall over. In his Home Guard uniform Russell resembles the lovable Godfrey of Dad’s Army, so that it is horrid to imagine what a beastly sergeant-major might say to him: ‘Well, well, what have we here? Is it a Womble? Is it Winnie-the-Pooh?’ In fact, Russell was always ...”

“... a chosen people, and that the same Providence which, in 1688, had delivered them from Popery at home had also entrusted them with a religious mission to fight their ‘natural enemies’, the agents of the Bishop of Rome across the Channel. This was a mission as attractive and as flattering to Dissenters as it was to Anglicans; and though it did not do away ...”

“... in Patagonia without a qualm; or at least without being disturbed for doing so when he came home. Mr Bligh’s Bad Language deals primarily with the mutiny of the Bounty, weaving the account in and out of an ethnographical discussion of life aboard men-of-war and of the political and spiritual life of the Polynesians, with great emphasis on their ideas ...”

“... for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would soon ditch his campaign and carry him off to jail. Instead, the irrepressible huckster proposed to take advantage of London’s recently introduced system of ‘red routes’ by establishing a ...”

“... road the wall is made of blackened stone. Beyond it is the cannery. We are walking uphill towards home. This is the geography I have purchase on. I don’t know left or right. This is a steep village and so I just know up from down. I just know there and back, what’s before me and what’s behind. St Charles Borromeo, behind me, is called ‘our ...”

“... the evening, when the candles are lit, at the time when we celebrate the redemptive Passion of Our Lord, they bring together, in a house appointed for the purpose, young girls whom they have initiated into their rites. Then they extinguish the candles, so that the light shall not be witness to their abominable deeds, and throw themselves lasciviously on the ...”

“... self-destruction through anxiety and depression. Most mornings, the car that took him from his home in St John’s Wood to the Observer offices near Fleet Street would divert to Sigmund Freud’s old house in Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, where Freud’s daughter Anna still saw patients. There, Astor would spend a daily analytic hour on the couch ...”

“... motorway. She looked quite relieved to be getting out unscathed.’ Gill has another nice capture: Lord Coe and David Cameron, flaccid ties matching the blue of the coming fence, dark suits, hands in pockets, cardinals of capital strolling through the ruins of a captured city. It was in that moment I realised the game was up for Gordon Brown: he doesn’t ...”

“... not only smooth the conquering path of British commerce but contribute to the harmony of nations. Lord Palmerston, however, had less inclination to admire foreign models and none at all to adopt them. ‘Can you expect that the people of the United Kingdom will cast aside all the names of Space and weight and capacity which they learnt from their infancy and ...”

“... by them. One example was familiar and acceptable to Charles Darwin: the successive offspring of Lord Morton’s mare. Crossed with a quagga (a now extinct zebra with stripes confined to neck and forequarters), the Arab mare delivered a hybrid with stripes in evidence. Subsequently mated with a black Arab stallion, the mare again produced an offspring ...”

“... internationalist, addicted to thirty-mile walks in his oldest tweeds, he might have been more at home with Rory Stewart, but there’s possibly a bit of Buchan’s vision in the Black Stone of Brexit, and a bit of Hannay in Johnson’s swagger. It can’t only be down to Hitchcock that The Thirty-Nine Steps has never been out of print, or that most bookshops ...”

“... at Kew, and when he was stopped, lay on the ground and refused to budge, having to be carried home on his servants’ shoulders. A few days later, Dr Francis Willis unveiled his new purpose-built restraining chair, which George immediately dubbed my ‘Coronation Chair’. He might have been deprived of his wits, but he never lost his wit. He noted that ...”