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“... improvement (he was among the first to import merino sheep) but also to his rootedness in English soil. Far from wishing to enlarge the royal prerogative, Roberts tells us, George was devoted to the settlement of 1688. ‘The pride, the glory of Britain, and the direct end of its constitution, is political liberty,’ he wrote in one of his essays for ...”

“... on, know no Arabic and see no Arabs. They create an exclusive (it’s also a very second-rate) English society quite cut off from the life of the town. I now begin to understand why British government has come to grief in India.’These words, written in 1923, might well have been Freya Stark’s a decade or so later. Freya, however, arrived at her view of ...”

“... of sensible is censured as an example of ‘low conversation’ in his Dictionary of the English Language). The thing most likely to have struck her was how easily and strongly his feelings were affected. ‘It was a love-match on both sides,’ Johnson said simply. He was born in Market Square, slap bang in the middle of Lichfield, in September ...”

“... nevertheless has his forerunners: Byron’s Manfred and Milton’s Satan, to mention only familiar English prototypes. In spite of his self-proclaimed baseness, he frequently wins our sympathy, for instance in his role as an irreverent latter-day Prometheus. Speaking to the abject Creator, he warns him:I shall hit your hollow carcass – so hard that I ...”

“... unsettling realisation that the colonists were justified in their complaints. From Edmund Burke to Richard Price, observers across the political spectrum struggled to see much evidence of British liberty in the crass mismanagement that led to the Revolution. Some even followed Jefferson, who in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence blamed Britain ...”

“... his picture. If he gives the best account of the war from the other side that there has been in English, he neglects its significance in British political history. First blood was shed over a religious conflict, but far from the Black Sea. Ancient rivalries between eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholics vying to control the holy places in Jerusalem erupted ...”

“... watched their tongues when he was around. The rest, if they thought about it, imagined ‘Richard’ probably had to sign some nasty piece of paper in order to get out of Poland: so bloody what? After reading Domosławski’s compelling, exhaustive and often upsetting book, their easy tolerance – like mine – begins to look different. In the first ...”

“... country in South-East Asia, he meant what ‘Vietnam’ nearly always means in post-1970s American English: the historical moment when Americans met themselves in a foreign mirror and were frightened by what they saw. ‘We were in the jungle,’ Coppola went on. ‘There were too many of us. We had access to too much money, too much equipment – and little ...”

“... Richard Holmes published Shelley: The Pursuit in 1974. More than a decade later, in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), he recalled how obsessive his engagement gradually became, not just with Shelley, but with that whole group of English expatriates associated with him, as it moved from Geneva through Italy – Bagni di Lucca, Este, Venice, Rome, Naples, Ravenna, Pisa – shedding some members and adding others, before finally disintegrating when Shelley and Edward Williams were drowned off Leghorn in July 1822 ...”

“... awards. She can think on her feet and speaks in forthright, easy to follow Japanese (and similar English – she went to a Quaker high school in Philadelphia). On screen and off, she retains the common touch made famous by her father, son of a bankrupt horse-dealer, who left school at 13. Tanaka père was one of the first Japanese politicians to scent the ...”

“... I suppose because the rasping quality in his voice echoed Auden’s harsh tones. However, because Richard Griffiths was available and indeed anxious to play the part, the role went to him. Emergency casting sessions such as the one Gambon knew we were holding are always mildly hysterical and often very funny as assorted names (often wildly unsuitable) are put ...”

“... to bring countries together than any number of EU directives.’ He quotes another political hero, Richard Cobden, the Manchester textile manufacturer and Anti-Corn Law Leaguer, who described free trade as ‘God’s diplomacy’, not bothering to notice that in the case of the redundant cotton weavers of Bengal, the casualties of cheap Lancashire cloth, God ...”

“... Lilies comes from a 14th-century manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques, a remnant from the medieval English royal library, now in the British Library: it depicts the Battle of Gisors in 1198 between the armies of Richard I of England and Philip II.The chroniclers’ shaping of the public perception of these kings, and their ...”

“... what a talent they had hired: Cockburn had long since read and absorbed almost the entire body of English literature, emerging as a wonderfully fluent and vivid writer. But his salary didn’t come close to paying for his untidy, riotous life in a huge Kurfürstendamm flat, and it wasn’t until 1929 that Dawson offered him a steady job as a subeditor in ...”

“... at least until Peaky Blinders came along? In my experience, nobody, not even Oswald Mosley or Richard Nixon, was capable of radiating such unease in company. Harold Macmillan couldn’t stand having Powell opposite him in cabinet looking ‘like Savonarola eyeing one of the more disreputable popes’. So he relocated Enoch way down the table where he ...”