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“... obviously political. He belonged to a social crowd that didn’t intersect much with mine: Home Counties, landed gentry, a stockbroker father somehow involved – the customary expensive vagueness – ‘in finance’, a grand house I could only imagine and probably in those days envied. These boys all knew one another from somewhere else, fraternised ...”

“... wife, Andromache, calls her maids to heat water for ‘a hot bath for Hektōr when he came home from the fighting –/unaware, in her folly, that far from all baths he’d been slain’. Inside the walls of Troy there is no problem about the presence of baths or any other amenity: it is a well-built domestic space where there is weaving and warm ...”

“... alienation from his new – that is, acquired – and, in Conrad’s rather special case, admired home. His friends all said of Conrad that he was very contented with the idea of being English, even though he never lost his heavy Polish accent and his quite peculiar moodiness, which was thought to be very un-English. Yet the moment one enters his writing the ...”

“... own party. Like Bagehot’s opinions of the Second Reform Act, Dicey’s interventions against Home Rule form a tactically convenient stick for Mount to wave at writers whose real offence lies elsewhere – tarnishing the aura of monarchy, and opening the door to popular sovereignty. Jennings, by contrast, requires no side-gambit. Mount taxes him directly ...”

“... houses, behind evergreen trees, houses which turn out to be lunatic asylums. Stockbridge, peaceful home of Norman Rockwell, the people’s artist, who gave Middle America what it wanted. Stockbridge, where Melville said something unmemorable to Hawthorne. Stockbridge, the site of the family grave – known, weirdly, as ‘the Pie’ – of the Sedgwick ...”

“... folk music – the Marxist line in the 1930s. Waller was also wary of false consciousness. ‘Lord, there’s one of those Georgian Arabians,’ he exclaims with feigned surprise as Assistant Sheik Herman Autrey starts his trumpet solo. ‘Mercy! But watch out for them camels!’ warns the fastidious Waller. At the conclusion of ‘Spring Cleaning ...”

“... In 1954, at the trial of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu for homosexuality, the counsel for the prosecution, G.D. ‘Khaki’ Roberts (‘fruity-voiced, with a bottle of bright pink cough mixture always at hand’), put it to Peter Wildeblood, one of the co-defendants, that his lover Edward McNally was ‘infinitely his social inferior’, as though this social miscegenation were as much an offence as the act of buggery itself ...”

“... mount, while it pursuesThings unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.The Aonian mount is Helicon, home to the nine Muses of ancient Greece, so the gesture at once locates Milton’s poem within the classical epic tradition and announces its aim to surpass it. Ambitious words, though their presumption is tempered by their illocutionary force; Milton is not ...”

“... Edward​ Long arrived ‘home’ in the ‘mother country’ in 1769 with his wife and three young children after 12 years as a planter in Jamaica. His return presented no problems. He was a colonist, a ‘freeborn Englishman’, welcomed back to ‘his’ country. His wife came, as he did, from an elite white dynasty and his children, though they were born in Jamaica, inherited his birthright ...”

“... of a patent lawyer and ‘an accomplished Ottawa hostess’ with a house in Ottawa and a summer home next to that of Premier Mackenzie King. She graduated to the company of the rogues and rascals from a life typified by lunch with Mrs Barrington Ward, wife of the Times editor (Mrs Ward ‘in a dark reddish dress with fully pleated collar, looking what the ...”

“... known to most people only through this gloss. Born in 1874, the eighth child of Ned Baring, first Lord Revelstoke and head of the Baring Brothers bank, Maurice had an idyllic childhood, spent mainly at Membland, the family home in Dorset – a house with a larder big enough for 2000 head of game. After an equally idyllic ...”

“... he never claimed to resemble him, pointed out that Lampedusa’s Don Fabrizio is a great feudal lord whereas the Senyor is merely a poor Majorcan squire. Besides, while The Leopard records the disappearance of an entire society, Bearn only describes the disappearance of the Senyor. Yet though the scale is different, there are similarities in attitude and ...”

“... academic writings on the 19th century state are rewarded with an entry of nine lines, the same as Lord John Russell who was merely in office at the time. This is three lines less than Bonar Law, dubbed by Asquith as the unknown prime minister, which proportionately must make Russell practically unheard-of. Such are the revenges of history, or at least of ...”

“... of the scale and direction of any dynamic effects on British manufacturing industry of having a ‘home market’ with a population of 250 million. While no final conclusion can be reached yet, there is no doubt at all that Lord Kaldor, who always maintained these effects would be adverse, has the best of the argument at ...”

“... miniature. Bread comes to feature in these pages like a household ghost: stale for Tommy Morgan; home-made (by her father) for the dressmaker’s daughter; for the stockbroker’s son, resented buttered slices to be fought through before getting to the cake. The kitchen boy’s memory of the farmer’s daughter’s rebuke to her maid – ‘Never, never give ...”