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All my life I've been aware of the Second World War humming in the background. I was born 10 years after it was finished, and without ever seeing it. It formed my generation and the world we lived in. I played Hurricanes and Spitfires in the playground, and war films still form the basis of all my moral philosophy. All the men I've ever got to my feet for or called sir had been in the war.
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He (Jeremy Clarkson) is the last man standing on the beach commanding the glaciers' melt waters to go back
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This is our high calling, to represent Christ, and act in His behalf, and in His character and spirit, under all circumstances and toward all men.
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The soul of the slave, the soul of the "little man," is as dear to me as the soul of the great.
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Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose, But young men think it is, and we were young.
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When I was one-and-twenty I heard a wise man say, `Give crowns and pounds and guineas But not your heart away; Give pearls away and rubies But keep your fancy free.' But I was one-and-twenty No use to talk to me. When I was one-and-twenty I heard him say again, `The heart out of the bosom Was never given in vain; 'Tis paid with sighs a plenty And sold for endless rue.' And I am two-and-twenty And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.
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It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.
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If a literary man puts together two words about music, one of them will be wrong.
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Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn't saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.
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I always think back to the original movies and to those quieter moments where Luke is out in A New Hope, and there are the two suns setting. It is the equivalent, basically, of a farm boy dying to get out of his small town and do something bigger. It's those kinds of universal themes that ground this whole thing in space.
