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“... coded designations have cheerfully informed them that they’re in the building that inspired George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. The BBC is in fact properly proud of the famous writers who have worked there, and (in the past at least) possibly prouder of the novels, poems and plays they wrote in their spare time than the programmes they produced in ...”

“... left Osborne in 1956, at the point where – in 17 days – he had completed Look back in anger. George Devine, the first artistic director of the English Stage Company, arrives in his life (in a rowing-boat) and makes him ‘preposterously famous’. Osborne vehemently denies claims that the play was first entitled On the Pier at Morecambe, but a ...”

“... corner of Victoria’s England is so very unlike what we know of it from Dickens and Mayhew, George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell, it seems rather an unreal landscape. Quite fortuitously, while reading the book, I found in a Victorian journal telling criticism of one of the landed proprietors whose garden is described here in glowing terms, and whose head ...”

“... British imperial superiors, even – Scott Anderson suggests – to the point of treason. (When George V tried to decorate him after the war, he handed all the medals back on the spot.) He was also very much against European cultural imperialism, genuinely – so far as we can tell – preferring ‘Eastern’ ways. (Certain Eastern ways, that is: he had a ...”

“... exemplifies the rise of the idea of freedom as a white prerogative. It’s also the birthplace of George Wallace, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century, who struck electoral gold by claiming that an alliance of the federal government and the civil rights movement was undermining the freedom of whites. Cowie uses Barbour to describe ...”

“... hunting estate at Spring-gun and Treadmill. Some of the names indicate real-life targets such as George Canning, the Tory statesman who started out as the attack dog of the Anti-Jacobin, and Wordsworth, whose acceptance of a government post as Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland in 1813 confirmed his apostasy from radical politics. Other names aim at ...”

“... while at the same time enabling it to appeal to believers in Christian duty and to believers like George Eliot in some secular equivalent. The novel as a whole is contradictory, and the picture it gives of the human mind is one that lays stress on contradiction. The story of Clarissa versus Lovelace is told in a fashion which has made it hard, for more than a ...”

“... The road up to the high pass at Mont Cenis was long and treacherous. The British tourist Anna Miller, who took the same route six months after Hammond in the autumn of 1770, noted that collapsing bridges and ‘being crushed to death by ponderous rocks’ were two possible hazards; in the winter there were avalanches, rolling ‘Snow balls’ of ...”

“... bloated empire imagined just after the Seven Years War for the early 20th century in The Reign of George VI (1763). If Mercier imagined away absolute monarchy and the established Church in favour of patriot kingship and natural religion, these English utopians reassured their readers that crown, church and state would still be flourishing three centuries ...”

“... politically conservative, defensively étatiste, it seemed in the Sixties to be everything Karl Miller claimed – and not all that far removed from the Scottish situation. Yet within a decade it was to provide proof that a reformist intelligentsia could create its own economic and political dynamic. Miller’s position ...”

“... I’ve always had a soft spot for George III, starting all of forty years ago when I was in the sixth form at Leeds Modern School and reading for a scholarship to Cambridge. The smart book around that time was Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History, which took the 19th century to task for writing history with one eye on the future, and in particular for taking as the only path through the past the development of democratic institutions ...”

“... pieces for the LRB, as an Oxford scholar whose politics were to the left of the editor’s (Karl Miller favoured the SDP, while Johnson favoured Labour). Nowadays I think he’d still say he was on the left but it isn’t obvious what that would mean, in his case especially. Like many people, he prides himself on describing things as they really are.As the ...”

“... George Bush’s proud declaration that by bombing fleeing Iraqi soldiers America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all’, was one of the more startling instances from recent years of the Vietnam War’s continuing hold on the American imagination. One could just about suspend disbelief when Sylvester Stallone set about rewriting history, but it was disconcerting to find the President of the United States so clearly in the grip of the same fantasy of revenge ...”

“... and liked to think he had enjoyed a romantic friendship with Princess Charlotte, George IV’s daughter, whose royal blood rendered her inaccessible. They exchanged letters and gifts, but it amounted, we are told, to ‘little more than une amitié amoureuse’. The Duke wept when the Princess died in childbirth, but so did all England. In ...”

“... of Netflix, Amazon and YouTube, there are 700 agents at CAA, but the story told in James Andrew Miller’s riveting book is really about the personalities who invented the game. It is, more particularly, the story of what Michael Ovitz gave to the world and what that world took away from him. It’s Citizen Kane to a disco beat with the moral sophistication ...”