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“... are Imogen’s amateur vivisectionist stepmother and her son, the would-be rapist Cloten: ‘Britain’s a world/By itself,’ he vaunts, ‘and we will nothing pay/For wearing our own noses.’ Both are defeated over the course of the play, and its happy ending celebrates Cymbeline’s wise decision that ...”

“... era to be given a Unesco World Heritage listing. It is a commonplace that modern architecture in Britain, as an ideology, was an import from interwar Central Europe – dropped off en route to the US by Mendelsohn or Gropius, and picked up by permanent émigrés like Goldfinger, Lubetkin et al – and Ahrends’s book is a document of the way the architects ...”

“... biography, and all other forms of snobbish gossip. This is why things are as bad as they are in Britain now. There is a great deal of philistinism in the British Isles, true, and it does a great deal of harm. But in trying to construct a thesis, Kenner finds himself working back and back to find when we started sinking, and absent mindedly includes both ...”

“... of Israel, the book which appeared under Wilson’s name in 1981: ostensibly a history of ‘Britain, America and the State of Israel’, it was a weirdly one-sided polemic, whose hero was Balfour and villain Ernest Bevin, Attlee’s foreign secretary and an ogre to Zionists to this day. It was so slipshod and inaccurate that Thurston Clarke in the New ...”

“... he was advised by his doctors to take a holiday. He reluctantly agreed, spending three weeks at Ian Fleming’s somewhat spartan Jamaican hideaway, even though British troops remained on the ground in Egypt. When he returned, it soon became clear that he could not continue in office (at the 18 December meeting of the 1922 Committee Eden was forced to admit ...”

“... nobody refers to Keith Kyle as a ‘collusion theorist’ because he explodes the claim that Britain, France and Israel were not acting in concert in 1956. The term ‘organised crime’, which suggests permanent conspiracy, is necessary both to understand and to prosecute a certain culture of wrongdoing. And you may have noticed that those who are too ...”

“... comes along every century or so, but the 2013 calamity – part of a series of floods that wracked Britain that winter – was portrayed by the government and media as an outrider of man-made climate change. And yet the government response was broadly the same as in 1953: money was rushed into building new flood defences. The best – a cynic would say the ...”

“... film books (they have been publishing screenplays for some time). Since the mid-Seventies, Britain has been lamentably served in this respect, with the decline or disappearance of the main series that flourished in the Sixties, the era of Bergman, Fellini and Godard. Secker had Cinema One and Cinema Two; Lorrimer did Classic and Modern Film ...”

“... long time it has been the business of academics to build genealogies for the Novel that challenge Ian Watt’s narrative of its ‘rise’ via Defoe and Richardson and Fielding. Yet the many prehistories of the Novel that try to make Richardson’s achievement appear less surprising miss a simple truth: his contemporaries did think that Richardson’s ...”

“... of Saint Joan. In the fearful climate preceding the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in Britain in 1967, Redgrave’s sexuality was anxiously hidden from his children. After the birth of Corin’s first child Redgrave finally confessed ‘that I am, to say the least of it, bisexual’; his son sympathised with the burden of guilt and shame that he ...”

“... but over the years, the subtitle clambered into first place and usurped the incumbent. As Ian Hacking remarks in a witty and astute foreword, this is rather like the Cheshire Cat leaving behind only its grin. Hacking suggests that the disappearance or suppression of the déraison is a sign that Foucault had changed his mind about ...”

“... dismissed it as a bit of fun, but a spokesperson for Sturgeon responded: ‘Brexit may risk taking Britain back to the early 1970s, but there is no need for coverage of events to lead the way.’When #MeToo ripped across the globe in October 2017, the Scottish government was particularly receptive. It set up a review of its existing complaints procedure ...”

“... say, Pincher accepts as gospel virtually every allegation ever made by the extreme Right in either Britain or the US. Thus Joe McCarthy’s allegation that Alger Hiss was a Communist spy is treated as simple fact, as is his claim that FDR’s most trusted adviser. Harry Dexter White, the founder of the IMF and the World Bank, was also working for the ...”

“... inquiries have become an increasingly common means of addressing scandals and crises in Britain. Some have resulted in serious and enduring change: the regime of DBS checks for child safety is a direct result of the Bichard inquiry into the Soham murders. Others, such as the post-Savile Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse and the ongoing ...”

“... Britain is​ the most centralised country in the Western world. Its political system is weighted overwhelmingly towards Westminster, with few institutional safeguards against the writ of Parliament, itself increasingly in thrall to the executive. Of every £1 raised in taxation, 91 pence is controlled and allocated by central government ...”