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“... him. Their lukewarm defence was that he was probably the best of a bad bunch. With this judgment Denis Winter emphatically does not agree, and in Haig’s Command he launches the most devastating attack on Haig’s reputation since the publication of Lloyd George’s self-serving memoirs in the Thirties. Much of it, admittedly, is old hat. Haig’s ...”

“... Denis Thatcher is entirely inventable – as John Wells understood: he comes in a flat pack with easy-to-follow instructions, all the components familiar general shapes, all parts from stock, no odd angles, no imagination required. When they came up with the idea for Ikea, they used Denis Thatcher as the prototype ...”

“... and conventionally grotesque language with which Ovid evokes a desolate landscape of unrelieved winter. Jan Felix Gaertner, in the introduction to his commentary on the first book of the second collection from exile, provides a full battery of sobering information to show that Ovid knew what he was talking about: the average temperature in January is below ...”

“... on and on. The sixth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians will come out next winter, all 20 volumes, 18,000 pages, 22,500 articles, 7,500 cross-references, over three thousand illustrations, over two thousand five hundred music-type examples – if the dust-cover of Percy Young’s biography of its founder is to be believed. The New ...”

“... as Alice Taylor, at Castle Top on the edge of the Peak District, ‘a snow baby’, in the deep winter of 1884, ‘the cattle shut in their houses’ and the candles alight in the warm kitchen to welcome her. These memories became compulsive, as did the need to preserve them. In Ambush of Young Days and The Country Child, both for adult readers, she brought ...”

“... and ‘moored Fritz, her miniature dachshund, a neurotic dandy in his lime-green knitted winter coat, to the table leg with a round turn and two half-hitches, and bribed him with scraps to stop him warbling like an off-key flute’. But Fritz would not be welcome in the dining-room now. People were scoffing chicken liver pâté with walnuts and ...”

“... altar boy. Jacques, a tall, painfully thin boy, left school early to become a factory worker in St Denis, the most proletarian suburb of Paris. This perfectly ordinary career was changed for ever by his call-up in 1917. He fought heroically at the front – an experience which scarred his life – and was then retained in the Army after the war, to be sent ...”

“... of the force of Synge’s Riders to the Sea, ends where it has to end: They will say next winter At the fires ‘Leif Ericson went The fool’s voyage.’ A man will sing to a harp ‘Heroes Venture for more than bits of gold.’ An old woman will say To girls at candle time ‘It is that slut, the sea Always That has their hearts.’ ‘Seal Island ...”

“... in fact, petrified water. He believed that rock crystal could only ‘be found in places where the winter snow freezes with the greatest intensity’; in his case, Alpine riverbeds, the major source of rock crystal in Europe at the time. From this idea of the stone’s cold, magical transformation, it was given the name krystallos (Greek for ‘ice’). In ...”

“... drew and painted on the spot to use as the basis for studio work done (along with teaching) in the winter. He exhibited at the Royal Academy and had a number of loyal patrons. Among his pupils were women of means and influence. The major work of the last part of his life was a panorama of London – painted in oil and covering nearly two thousand square ...”

“... were silent. Many pilots were superstitious, and planes often carried talismans and trinkets – Denis Winter, in The First of the Few, calls this ‘mystical ballast’. By the spring of 1917, the tone of Fernald’s letters had altered: they were no longer jocular – he had been fond of quips and wordplay – but sombre and introspective. ‘We just ...”

“... When they asked Haldane what sort of an army he had in mind, his reply was: A Hegelian army.’ Denis Healey calls his six years at the Ministry of Defence in the Sixties ‘the most exhilarating period of my life’ and ‘the most rewarding of my political career’. These are, of course, relative judgments, reflecting the barrenness of Labour politics in ...”

“... migrate in ‘the run-up to Christmas’. Here I sit amidst the hubbub of the rue de Seine while a winter fly snores at a window-pane. Old existentialists, old beats, old punks sat here of old; some dedicated drunks still sing in the marketplace, and out the back there’s an old guy who knew Jack Kerouac. Spring in January now, of course: no doubt the daffs ...”

“... no problem for the reporters and television crews who blocked the bridge in the pale sunshine of a winter’s afternoon. This was 25 January 1981, and the launch of the manifesto that came to be known as the Limehouse Declaration. When Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, David Owen and I met together that morning, we were clear in our intention: in breaking the ...”

“... of whisky and ginger ale, ‘but she was never drunk,’ and she did not get through as much as Denis, who could more or less subsist on gin. She didn’t have hangovers and she didn’t get ill (she sometimes had toothache). Her skin continued to glow and her eye remained fierce. More striking than the amount of sleep she needed was her ability to sleep at ...”