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“... of Arabs into Nazareth, as he calls it, is a national priority. The city was built in the 1950s. David Ben-Gurion was outraged by the presence of so many Arabs in the Galilee when he toured the region in 1953, a few days before he retired for a year and half from his premiership. He appointed the director general of the Ministry of Defence, Shimon Peres, to ...”

“... Early 19th-century Edinburgh had a lot less time for James Hogg than for the Ettrick Shepherd, the literary persona created partly by Hogg himself, partly by the tight circle that ran Blackwood’s Magazine. Comic, bibulous, full of naive folk-wisdom, easy to patronise, the Ettrick Shepherd was invented as a souvenir of the pastoral Lowlands, a survival whose presence among one of the Edinburgh literary élites could represent both the continuity of modern Scots culture and the impolite past it had left behind ...”

“... explain and go to check the newspapers. The Independent has a well-informed and balanced piece by David McKittrick on the genesis of the ceasefire. He seems cautiously optimistic. Not so that other old ham, Conor Cruise O’Brien, writing on the same newspaper’s opinion pages. O’Brien sees the timing of the ceasefire as evidence of a Machiavellian plot to ...”

“... photographs of what the town was like in the 1920s and 1930s. They show farmland and orange groves, with outcrops of buildings at crossroads. When you see a photograph of Samuel Goldwyn in jodhpurs, that’s not because he’s dressed for the role of whip-cracking dictator. No, he often rode a horse to the studio, following bridle paths. When California ...”

“... skies.’ Painters of flat land, denied rocks, hills, torrents and mountains, turn to trees (in groves, avenues and forests); to the sky and clouds; and to light as it changes from sunrise, to high noon, to sunset, and to moonlight. With these they are able to dramatise plains, prairies, steppes and meadows. In the 17th century the Dutch did it. The ...”

“... Palestine has less connection with the modern world than with the picturesque towns engraved by David Roberts in the 19th century. Old men still talk about their orange groves and their old stone houses in Jaffa, remembering every tree and every stone, and one doesn’t have the heart to tell them that the houses have ...”

“... When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England ...”

“... of Jerusalem, a place of apartment blocks and car repair shops? Was he unaware that the olive groves of which he spoke so emotionally had in some cases disappeared, that the bare hilltops were now sporting Jewish settlements? What could he do to arrest these things, sitting here in this drafty hut so many miles from ‘Palestine’? The bare light-bulb ...”

“... on 22 December 1969 that he had ‘bought a lot of new trees’ and was ‘planting 2 little groves of birches’ to frame a marble sundial. Little Sparta ‘Sea Poppy I’ (1966) ‘Arcadia’ (1973)PreviousNext Forty-five years later, Little Sparta is thriving (open three afternoons a week throughout the summer), but its founder remains an elusive ...”

“... of Liberals and Marxists alike, while the New Right delights in a pedigree which reaches back to David Hume and Adam Smith. In the United States scholars have established the influence of Francis Hutcheson, Hume and Smith on the American Revolution and the making of the Constitution. This view has been widely disseminated – to the liberal left by Garry ...”

“... Georgian society and culture in one fabulous setting. As places of commerce masquerading as wooded groves, pleasure gardens offered idealised rus in urbe. They could seem poetic in the dusk as the visitor listened to the evening chorus of resident songbirds, but were transportingly magical as night fell and hundreds, if not thousands, of lights were ...”

“... even in the darkest days of war than they ever could be on the hills of Wales or in the painting groves of the South of France.      So, although I think that I was a decisive and even an adventurous politician at various stages in my life, and had more sensible views about how to lead a government than many of those who have actually done it, I ...”

“... items kept in storage in the early lyrics, or on loan from Keats and Swinburne (vineyards, olive groves, emblematic minerals, pards, maelids, bassarids, the pad of furry feet in the undergrowth). This looks like dionysiac kitsch. But it was considered an improvement on the documentary rigours of Cantos LII-LXXI. Most reassuring of all, to Pound’s ...”

“... In the Thirties and early Forties the English poet David Gascoyne was much enamoured of the Continental, Late Romantic image of writing and of the writer as a visionary misfit. By the end of the Thirties, his place in the great Euro-Visionary Song Contest was almost secured. He confessed his ambition in his Journals in 1938: Want to write an essay on ‘The Apotheosis of Lautréamont ...”

“... from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels – whose ...”