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“... Oliver Dowden​ , the co-chairman of the Conservative Party, appeared twice on the Today programme late last year. First, on 15 November, he answered questions about his party’s handling of the corruption allegations against the MP Owen Paterson, and then again on 17 December, he discussed the loss of Paterson’s North Shropshire seat at the by-election necessitated by his resignation ...”

“... Penne (low-carb soy pasta) – and, spelt phyllo and soy pasta apart, you can almost see Jamie Oliver . . . No, I suppose not. In any case, Dr Atkins had now become a corporate institution. He was no longer a well man. He had a heart attack in 2002, which, his office stipulated, was the result of an infection he had suffered from ‘for a few years’, and ...”

“... stemming from Heaney’s awareness that he is reworking a cliché about Irishness. As Oliver MacDonagh put it, quoting Lloyd George, in States of Mind (1983), his magnificent study of the mutual bewilderment that has chiefly constituted Anglo-Irish relations, ‘while the English do not remember any history, the Irish forget none’ – a ...”

“... long and distinguished career. A Little History of Poetry canters from Gilgamesh and Homer to Mary Oliver and Les Murray in three hundred pages with a breezy sense of mission, assuming in the reader no previous acquaintance with the subject (‘Confessional poetry is poetry that reveals personal confidences, especially relating to mental illness and ...”

“... and passages are gone,When nettles wave upon a shapeless moundAnd saplings root among the broken stone.Nothing now roots among the broken stone: the site where the house once stood is cemented over, as though to contain uneasy spirits in the foundations. It is a palpable absence, a warning that this is what can happen to ...”

“... After the putsch collapsed, Gorbachev doggedly resumed his search for the philosopher’s stone which would turn a disintegrating empire into a functioning union. The coda of his political life was his effort to bring the republican leaders to sign something which could paste over the widening cracks between them. In this he was assisted by Grigory ...”

“... of his book. As he points out, Lutyens himself was deeply involved, through his wife, with Oliver Lodge and spiritualism, with Annie Besant and theosophy, and with Eastern religion generally. Perhaps his quasi-pantheistic belief that ‘all religions had some truth in them’ was expressed in the ‘universal truths’ of his two great monuments. But ...”

“... of Evesham, who were not displeased to acquire an apparently inexhaustible supply of good building stone. The 35 monks put down from their seats in the abbey choir were assured of a pension from the bureaucracy set up by Henry VIII and his details man and fixer, Thomas Cromwell. Abbot Hawford’s career was not over; he died seventeen years later as dean of ...”

“... impulsive tics and Korsakoff’s (Sergei, that is) amnesia, both recently made famous again by Oliver Sacks; Creutzfeld-Jacob disease, just to bring us right up to the mad cow. (No woman – at least at this level – seems to have had anything named after her.) A name announces only the dénouement, however: it does not convey the extraordinary ...”

“... in London?); pyramids (what were they?) towered above the desert (but what was that?). There was a stone animal, the ‘sphinx’, which I took for a long time to be a pair of something, such as slippers or scissors. Time had elapsed. Slowly? Quickly? I can’t say. At some point, Maureen and her grandmother had returned to England to live in a big house ...”

“... illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of non-violence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the ...”

“... At the end of a path lined with cypress trees a rectangle of clipped lawn is enclosed by low grey stone walls. Some 356 British soldiers and airmen of the First World War are buried here, the graves set in rows, softened by evergreen shrubs, floribunda roses and photinia trees. The headstones are engraved with regimental badges, names, ranks and dates. The ...”

“... with his brother Frank, describing Galway as a grand little magic grey town full of sensitive stone and bridges and water. We … spent a day walking on Achill right out over the Atlantic … Altogether it was an unforgettable trip and much too short, through bog and mountain scenery that was somehow far more innocent and easy and obvious than the ...”

“... not only one of the half-dozen greatest epistolary classics, but a sort of milestone – the last stone of the age whose close the Great War has marked. They are a magnificent commentary on the literary life of his generation, and they’re done in a style which will never be used naturally again. In the years that followed Harry James was contacted by many ...”

“... of Leeds. There is a picture of Kirkstall and the inscription: ‘Built in 1147. Destroyed by Oliver Cromwell in 1539.’ This was what most people believed in Leeds when I was a boy, the notion that there could have been two iconoclasts named Cromwell but a century apart too much of a coincidence for them to take. The idea that it was ‘built in ...”