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Mind your language

Do you ‘cock a snook’ – or snoot?

26 October 2024

9:00 AM

26 October 2024

9:00 AM

‘This is interesting, darling,’ my husband called out from beside his whisky while I was doing the washing-up. The interesting thing was in a short black-and-white film made by John Betjeman for television in 1968 and now on BBC iPlayer called Contrasts: Marble Arch to Edgware. The camera showed him in the bare interior of the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner turned into a little police station.

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