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“... It is hard for a reader in the mid-20th century to grasp that Podsnappish views could have been held in an open-eyed spirit by intelligent men and women in the Victorian period. The 20th century has a way of foisting its own kind of view on those Victorians who are perceived as intelligent. Hence the extremely improbable speculation that in Middlemarch ...”

“... The stagnant waters are frightening, partly, for their irrationality. Not that the evil spell held us always motionless. Mysterious currents drifted us here and there, with a stealthy power made manifest by the changing vistas of the islands fringing the east shore of the Gulf. And there were winds too, fitful and deceitful. They raised hopes only to dash ...”

“... and lions, with titles like ‘The Old Warrior’ (a lion, not a Masai). These are the work of David Shepherd and Simon Combes, who have donated reproduction fees to wild-life conservation funds. They are relevant to the text, in which the Baroness zestfully celebrates the beasts she killed, and also relevant to the tears of the moviegoers, enchanted by ...”

“... repulsive”, these were the epithets which Trotsky threw at the man who had so recently held out to him the hand of friendship.’ Still, it didn’t ring true somehow. I did what I assumed Steiner must have done. I turned to the beginning of the chapter and read again up to page 93. Just a few pages earlier, I found the explanation. Deutscher ...”

“... most miss the random but well-informed conversations we used to have at the critics’ meetings held every so often in the board room at lunchtime. The hard work was planning the general shape of the pages in the month to come. The easier work was in general chatter, ably moderated by, in my time, Roger Alton and then Helen Oldfield. Does anyone know ...”

“... with the vasty deep. By 1404, English authority throughout Wales was in tatters. Glyn Dŵr held his first parliament in May and not only explored alliances with Scotland and Ireland, but sent diplomatic missions urgently to France. Within two months a Franco-Welsh Treaty was signed. In 1405 a French force landed at Milford Haven and, combining with ...”

“... the words of the statute say less than they appeared to. The minority, of which Sumption was one, held it couldn’t – or needn’t – be done. For the majority, Lord Carnwath applied the principle that an unlawful decision was no decision and so was unprotected by the exclusionary clause. But neither of these is what the case was really about. The ...”

“... powerful man in the country and do their best to pretend he has some claim to be taken seriously (David Cameron reached the same plateau when his inability to remember how many houses he owned was allowed to fade into oblivion). With the result in the bag, the party handlers could safely let Kenny out of his pen for the final three-way debate. All in ...”

“... wistfully of seeing Len Hutton in his prime, captained a team called the Gaieties XI. Simon Gray, David Hare and Ronald Harwood are or were known to be keen on the game, too. And Tom Stoppard, another follower, has a striking set-piece in The Real Thing in which a playwright, explaining dramatic technique, says: ‘What we’re trying to do is to write ...”

“... frontiers in the making of nations. If Henry of Northumbria had not predeceased his father, King David I of Scotland, in 1152, Britain might have been divided at the Humber into two more equally sized political units, the kingdom of Greater Scotland (incorporating northern England) and the kingdom of Little England (made up of the midlands and south). Not ...”

“... resentment. Greek anti-semitism erupted in pogroms in Smyrna and Salonica. (Ottoman Jews, whom David Ben-Gurion despaired of converting to Zionism, were thus natural allies of the Turks.) In Alexandria under the Ottomans and from 1882 under the British, Europeans considered it acceptable to give Arabs a good hiding from time to time. The blending of ...”

“... could expect such (unpaid) hyperbole? Unlike Doubleday, Random House was old-fashioned and still held to the ideals of the ‘mighty generation’. Epstein found the firm congenial and it was his home for most of his publishing career, although he also found other outlets for his exuberant energies. In December 1962, a long strike began at the New York ...”

“... another example of ‘to fire out’ meaning what it is here taken to mean, and I notice that David and Ben Crystal, in their new glossary Shakespeare’s Words,* do not admit the venereal sense, giving only ‘to drive away by fire’. The poet is not even sure the parties have slept together, and could only have been certain of the consequence accepted ...”

“... were mere material for mockery. Amis quotes in his autobiography a truly hilarious parody of Lord David Cecil’s lecturing manner, admitting that he borrowed it from John Wain. I remember Wain ‘doing’ J.B. Leishman and F.W. Bateson, both of whom he respected, in a similar way. Such were the amusements of the Movement before its members became ...”

“... Change’. These pieces, together with McFarlane’s insightful work from the 1940s, David Morgan’s from the 1990s and a later Catto piece on ‘The Burden and Conscience of Government in the 15th Century’, are his lodestars. The Henry he gives us is largely familiar: deeply religious, just in temperament, firm and busily active in points of ...”