“... in Fussell’s critical performances the ‘residual complaints’ of a foot-soldier who, to adapt Norman Mailer’s phrase, had broken his ass for nothing. While ‘affecting to be annoyed primarily by someone’s bad writing or slipshod logic or lazy editing’, Professor Fussell was actually fussing that ‘the Air Corps had beds to sleep in, that ...”

“... in the 1980s, have gradually been frozen out again? Much has been made once again this summer of Norman Tebbit’s absurd cricket test, which demands that immigrants to this country support the England team. What makes it particularly absurd is that cricket, a game with genuinely multicultural appeal (unlike football, which despite its popularity in all ...”

“... Fenians had attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. It makes me wonder what Yeats and Burne Jones would have said had they seen Norman Tebbit under the ruins of the Grand Hotel. For Yeats, ‘good earth power’ is the force which inspires what he terms ‘sound national doctrine’. That doctrinal force is to be felt ...”

“... of antique beechwood and villages with eloquent names such as Swyncombe. From the time of the Norman Conquest onwards, Wiseman writes, those woods were cut for timber and charcoal, pannage was restricted, sheep came to the fore, and the hardy, semi-wild pig of the open forest seems to have lost ground to an animal fattened on cereals and legumes or housed ...”

“... an actor who doesn’t speak and is therefore non-existent on the page. It is there, as Emrys Jones suggested, in the sheer scale of Shakespeare’s tetralogies of history plays, and in their structure of fall, bitter consequences and ultimate redemption – the pattern that goes from the domestic strife that loses France and divides England to the ...”

“... beautiful with honeysuckle, clematis and lupins. The church is particularly interesting. A Saxon-Norman central tower has become a west tower with the disappearance of the original nave. Now a small Norman nave runs east of the tower on the site of the first chancel. There is a fine fresco above the chancel arch – a ...”

“... straight writer to have a gay hero is still highly unusual. A fascinating essay in this context is Norman Mailer’s ‘The Homosexual as Villain’, commissioned by the gay magazine ONE in the 1950s. He’s pretty unsparing of his own past novelistic practice, saying that when he thought homosexuality was evil it made sense to dole it out to negative ...”

“... moment of humiliation in Roth’s novel comes when Mickey Sabbath, taken in by his old friend Norman Cowan when no one else will help him, is discovered by his host arousing himself with intimate items belonging to Norman’s daughter. In Mother Land it comes when Jay, on another Friday morning invasion of Mother’s ...”

“... at Holkham, was done according to the traditions of the landed aristocracy. The bride wore a white Norman Hartnell gown; the long gallery was filled with presents, ‘including a silver inkwell from the queen’. Tenants from both family estates feasted in three marquees in the park, each with its own wedding cake. Princess Margaret, still single, was among ...”

“... significant expression, often in the apocalyptic idiom constructed for the purpose and explored in Norman Cohn’s works. (Aldous Huxley, in Overy’s quotation, sees ‘Belial’s guiding hand’ in modern history.) There are good reasons in European history why the sense that ‘we’ – however defined – feel under threat from outside enemies or inner ...”

“... points are the Greeks, the Gothic of Chartres, the Georgian terrace and the English Renaissance of Jones and Wren, which are admired but not venerated. Wren appears inside St Paul’s, a Baroque feature in himself with curly wig and generous embonpoint, surveying the dome through a spyglass. Arriving at the present, Lancaster watches it go past on the ...”

“... of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit minister David Jones concluded: ‘If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone.’ This is the sort of nostalgia Stuart Hall warned against as early as the 1970s, and which Peter Ammon, the outgoing German ambassador in London, identified recently when he ...”

“... handwritten and illustrated by artists – beginning with the trio of William Morris, Burne-Jones and Charles Fairfax Murray, who helped launch the work after some friends came across it in a remainders box outside Quaritch’s. Two years had passed since the bookseller first published it, at the price of 1s, and not a single copy, it seems, had been ...”

“... that lasted until the spell of the south, especially that of the ‘spirit-deadening’ Inigo Jones, was finally broken. Then the Gothic triumphed again with the birth of Romanticism, which began in England, ‘this self-sufficient island kingdom’, where ‘the Germanic character had not allowed itself to be overrun.’ As a critic Muthesius was more ...”

“... No one talking about anything else. The Speaker gave a right bollocking to Kate Hoey and Norman Baker for allegedly colluding with our oppressors in the media. A good five minutes’ worth. I’ve never seen him so worked up. Actually, it was way over the top. Gave the impression he is rattled, which I imagine he is.  Then to a jam-packed meeting ...”