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“... In any event he would have been pleased to return home to Austin, where – after his childhood in Cornwall and degree at Oxford and teaching in Zürich and London – he had been living for the last fifty years. He owned a flash pair of cowboy boots, but not a Stetson. Austin and the University of Texas were at their very best when Middleton arrived there in ...”

“... prophecy as he cuffed one of us about the ears.’ Her way out was getting a scholarship to West Cornwall School for Girls and from there finding work on a local newspaper on the Isles of Scilly. Another thing she needed to be brave about from an early age was the fact that she was lesbian and couldn’t tell anyone about it, until she eventually met a woman ...”

“... on the years 1500-1800, is to remind us of what could be seen as the glory days of habeas corpus. John Anderson was a slave in Missouri. Separated from his wife and family, whom he wished to visit, he came into conflict with his master and owner, who decided to resolve the problem by selling Anderson to another owner. In 1853, Anderson escaped and made for ...”

“... Voice’, which recalls the young writer meeting Emma Gifford, his wife-to-be, at a station in Cornwall. Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then, Standing as when I drew near to the town Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then, Even to the original air-blue gown! Hardy changed the last line from ‘Even to the original hat and ...”

“... has narrowed its meaning since Shakespeare wrote the Bastard’s great speech about it in King John, where it meant greed, self-interest, the opening bars of capitalism. Adshead’s book belongs to a recently growing genus of works on the history of particular commodities. To be of most value a study of this kind should be a part of general history, joined ...”

“... The dramatic west front, with its towering oriels, is an abstracted Tudor composition which, as John Summerson pointed out, may owe something to the central reference library in Bristol designed by a distinguished but less applauded English near contemporary, Charles Holden. But there was no precedent for the extraordinary library space behind those tall ...”

“... donations, but tokens of esteem, and she reciprocated, sending gifts from her farms: ‘my Lady Cornwall’ was given eight muscovy duck eggs and Ursula Vaughan received ‘a baskitt of apricocks’. These sociable exchanges were at least as important to the servants who trundled back and forth with the presents as they were to the recipients: tips were a ...”

“... of handcuffing the ‘Hetling’ artist, the police having finally tracked him down at his home in Cornwall: ‘We didn’t get Keating. We’re going to fucking get you.’ While investigating the case in London, the Cornish police visited galleries, dealers and ‘known associates’ of the suspects, including an antique-dealer friend of mine. He answered ...”

“... fabulous wealth and bad behaviour that persisted well after his death. In the late 17th century, John Aubrey (who was good on anecdotes though not quite so strong on truth) recorded that he once got one of Elizabeth’s maids of honour up against a tree. She protested with ‘Will you undoe me? Nay, sweet Sir Walter! Sweet Sir Walter! Sir Walter! At last as ...”

“... the Americans, in 1975 Whitlam was removed from office on flimsy grounds by the governor-general, John Kerr, and intelligence co-operation resumed. Kerbaj refrains from judgment on whether the CIA had a hand in the matter.In New Zealand, there was a more sustained challenge to the country’s position as a far-flung auxiliary in the US-led military and ...”

“... William Maginn, and the painter Daniel Maclise. Though the rumours put an end to her engagement to John Forster in 1835, nothing surfaced that she and her friends could not refute or explain away, and once she was dead, and in such a manner, the scandals faded into the background. It was said that she died of an accidental overdose, of tropical disease, that ...”

“... polishing and transporting of granite economically viable in Aberdeenshire, Cumberland and Cornwall. But there were also unprecedented numbers of amateurs, described by Tennyson in 1847 as ‘Hammering and clinking, chattering stony names/Of shale and hornblende, rag and trap and tuff’. What had been regarded as ‘heaven-sent images’ in stones ...”

“... and did not make much fuss when southerners referred to the whole island as ‘England’. Sir John Seeley wrote his prophecy of a global imperial destiny in 1883 under the title The Expansion of England. For generations, the fact of England’s numerical predominance in the UK was veiled by the image of the island English as the heroic founding ...”

“... he speaks is crammed with lovely words that could refresh the written language. Though he worships John Clare, Longley does not follow Clare in using dialect, and yet there is at the heart of his imagination a similar shyness and gentleness, a finely humane outlook with an almost mystical texture and cherishing puzzlement. Like Clare, Longley has a special ...”

“... politics. But what Hutton calls the ‘new model of ancient Celticity’, introduced in 2010 by John Koch and Barry Cunliffe in Celtic from the West, sees the spread of Celtic languages as a consequence of the existence of an Atlantic trade route rather than ‘waves of invasion’. Trade doesn’t necessarily bring peace. Slave shackles have been found at ...”