Sir Brian Crowe: From Foreign Office to Maastricht

A man and woman posing for a picture together.

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Sir Brian Crowe: From Foreign Office to Maastricht

When I was about eight or nine, I was given a copy of The New Statesman. I had no idea what it was, but I have always been an ardent newspaper-reader, and I eagerly sought out The New Statesman every day. I read it almost every evening, not just to enjoy the articles themselves but also to catch up with friends.
I was particularly taken with an article by my friend, the poet Robert Graves. It took me a while to make out what he was talking about; it was all in German, but I somehow contrived to follow the thread of his discussion. He spoke of the German invasion, of the way the Germans were able to invade without the support of the British, and of the way the British seemed to be unable to resist without support from the Frenc, of the way the Germans were able to invade without the support of the British, and of the way the British seemed to be unable to resist without support from the French.
I had not paid much attention to the discussion. I just wanted the rest of the article, which was all about the German invasion. I was too engrossed in the discussion to follow the rest of the article, which took up many pages, and I had no idea what the author was talking about. A few days later, however, I did learn about this article. I read it in Grosvenor House in London. I discovered that the article was very interesting.
I found that the author was the historian, Simon Schama. He was an old friend of mine; I had read most of his books in English and he had read most of mine in French and English.
Simon Schama was in the Foreign Office in London at the time of the First World War. His family were French; it was a great privilege and privilege came his family to England. He was born in Paris, in 1885. He was the son of a Swiss banker, the family was very rich.
Simon Schama was born about 1890. His father was a merchant. His mother was a Jewess.
Simon Schama wrote his first article in his fourth year at school. The editor of the school English magazine decided that it was a suitable subject for some of the young people who wrote to him. Simon Schama was one of these young people. The magazine put his article on a list of subjects for the younger boys that it published.
Simon Schama’s story begins in 1907.

A Conversation with Terry Harrison

Terry was born in Wingate, County Durham and was the son of Doris (nee Wardle ), a Shop Assistant, and Bob Harrison, a miner. He attended school in the pit village including the Wellfield AJ Dawson Grammar School, where I met him first. Bob encouraged Terry and his brother Alan to do something other than work in mining. Both became marine engineers. Terry left school at 15 to begin an engineering apprenticeship at Richardson Westgarth in Hartlepool. The apprenticeship required night schooling at Sunderland Technical College, and from there he enrolled in Mechanical Engineering at Durham University and graduated in 1955. He then performed his national service in Nigeria as an officer in the Corps of Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers before returning to the UK to start his career.
The following is an interview with Terry Harrison, a professor of English and a poet who was active in poetry circles in the 1970s and 1980s before his death in 2007. He was born in London.
Q: What was your background?.
HS: I was born in the suburbs of London and my father was from County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He was in the Royal Navy, I was born in the country and I grew up in the countryside, in various parts of the UK, mainly on the north coast. I went to school in England, I got my A levels in Yorkshire and I then went to university in Southampton where I met my wife Laura.
Q: What were you doing at the time?.
HS: After graduating with my BA I went off on a job as a lecturer in an English Literature Department at a small college in the north of England. I had already completed my MA, MA, MA and PhD and was still taking a year off to do my PhD. This was in the mid-1970s before the whole idea of the academic degrees became so trendy, like it does now. My MA was on the study of Diaspora, the notion of a Britishness in the context of migration.
Q: What did you study?.
HS: I was studying Diaspora in the context of Britishness and Britishness. I didn’t study English at all. What I was doing was studying English-as-a-foreign language. I read a lot of the stuff that I liked and I read a lot in the context of Diaspora literature in what we call the ‘Diaspora literary canon’ in the 1970s and 1980s. So if you said I want to do a biography of Diaspora fiction and I read Caresse Crosby’s books then I could read Diaspora novels. But I wanted to study something more fundamental than that.
Q: Why didn’t you do it any other way?.

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Spread the loveSir Brian Crowe: From Foreign Office to Maastricht When I was about eight or nine, I was given a copy of The New Statesman. I had no idea what it was, but I have always been an ardent newspaper-reader, and I eagerly sought out The New Statesman every day. I read it almost…

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