blue

Oh, and so many of them have a special bolognese recipe. And it’s never good.’ Usually when this happens the husband has an Italian ex-girlfriend from whom he learned a supposedly authentic yet surprising recipe, with one special touch: anchovies (twice), Worcestershire sauce (three times), coffee (once), buttermilk (once, particularly bad).

It’s a similar story with the flap copy that Orwell wrote for the first edition of Animal Farm, published in 1945 by Secker & Warburg.40 In clear, measured tones, it tells us: It is the history of a revolution that went wrong – and of the excellent excuses that were forthcoming at every step for each perversion of the original doctrine.

My father wore a fake Rolex that ran about four hours before it stopped. Get yourself a better watch! my mother railed at him, and he said, with perfect hatred pinching at his eyes, Better than a Rolex?

Isabella will continue to use such hyperbolic language, which in Austen’s novels is consistently a sign of mental vacuity or insincerity.

Far up the mountain, where the trees thinned out, just on the dividing line between sunshine and shadow, was a single, isolated building, as dwarfed by its surroundings as a fly drowning in a churn of milk. “The Bella Vista,” said the Colonel, almost reverently. There was a silence. “I didn’t realise it was so far up,” said Emmy at last, in a small

It was not in Mr Bulstrode’s nature to comply directly in consequence of uncomfortable suggestions. Before changing his course, he always needed to shape his motives and bring them into accordance with his habitual standard.

Use of a certain sort of pottery for serving ale or the choice of yarn and weave for one’s clothes was as sensitive to ideas of identity and fashion as the choice of trainers or home furnishings or holiday destinations is today.

When people moved to a new home in prehistoric, Roman and medieval societies, just as in our own, they cleared their old dwellings more or less comprehensively, taking portable and precious items – clothes, furniture, tools, lamps and cooking vessels – with them. It might have taken a few cartloads between old and new homes. Immovable, broken, low-

Then the master went, and Quint was alone.’ I followed, but halting a little. ‘Alone?’ ‘Alone with us.’ Then as from a deeper depth, ‘In charge,’ she added. ‘And what became of him?’ She hung fire so long that I was still more mystified. ‘He went too,’ she brought out at last.