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“... wrote a fulsome poem for the front of the book, paid for its publication, presented it to the King, and reviewed it in the Royal Society’s journal, which he himself edited. He made a profit of at least £10 out of the sales of the book. Few others got a look behind the scenes of this amazing work. Its impenetrability, and that of its author, became ...”

“... describes William Barrett, a doctor active in the Society for Psychical Research, assisting John Tyndall, a leading scientific naturalist, when Tyndall was demonstrating the effects of sound on light at the Royal Institution in the 1860s. Shaking a bunch of keys, or chirruping, or clapping loudly from a distance, Tyndall showed that he could quell the ...”

“... inhabitants of that same country, and not only in England. Across the Channel they wondered why a king should choose to marry his mistress. (The whole point is, however, that Anne never was Henry’s mistress, whereas her sister Mary was. When Henry was accused of having slept not only with Anne’s sister but with her mother, he disarmingly ...”

“... radical movements, sanctify the modern state? Lilla doesn’t even ask the question. Martin Luther King, whatever else he may have been, was a liberal Protestant root and branch. Might he, too, be relevant to Lilla’s story? Some of what Lilla misses is encapsulated in the proceedings of a meeting of 377 American liberal Protestant leaders in March 1942. This ...”

“... whale is a ‘tyrant’ who falls victim to the plots of little fishes, and finally a ‘slain king’ whose death goes unrevenged. In these respects he could be a precursor of Hobbes’s Leviathan – that other ‘confusion of a man and a whale’, as John Bramhall (one of Hobbes’s early critics) described it – and ...”

“... Then all around from far away across the world he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king of where the wild things are. But the wild things cried: ‘Oh please don’t go. We’ll eat you up – we love you so!’ And Max said: ‘No!’ The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes ...”

“... more concerned about keeping its plans secret from Washington. Some Americans, including Senator John F. Kennedy, already supported Algerian independence. Oil and gas had been found in Algeria, and French intelligence had discovered that American oil companies were in correspondence with an FLN leader, Ahmed Ben Bella, about possible oil leases. This was ...”

“... if sedition were being brewed on their premises. This was a significant threat: shortly after the king backed down from his banning order, several proprietors were arrested for continuing to permit ‘seditious discourses, and spreading false and seditious news’. Until the end of Charles II’s reign, and beyond, London’s coffee houses continued to be ...”

“... half a million Londoners every day by 1910. It was not the biggest chain in Victorian England. John Pearce started off with a coffee stall on the corner of East Road and City Road and by the 1890s had 46 refreshment rooms, 14 with hotels attached. Pearce & Plenty mostly catered for poor workers with ‘large appetites but small means’ as the Caterer put ...”

“... precedent that made labour longer and harder. Who better to blame for a protracted labour than a king with a kink? Of course, the anecdote is nonsense, but it is nonsense of an instructive kind. On the one hand, we are told that history is the enemy of pain and death, bringing the 19th-century invention of analgesics, survivable caesarean sections and ...”

“... at a few hours’ notice on family business and was resigning as treasurer. Nash and her husband, John, thought this was strange. They stopped by Hilldrop Crescent, but the windows were dark and no one answered the door. Why, the Martinettis asked Crippen, had Belle taken hardly any luggage with her, just one small basket? He said it was because she’d had ...”

“... continued ever since. Perhaps the most serious accusations were levelled by the British journalist John Cornwell, whose book Hitler’s Pope, published in 1999, in effect painted Pius XII as a Nazi sympathiser. Decades before his election as pope on 2 March 1939, Eugenio Pacelli had served as papal nuncio to Bavaria, and in this capacity had witnessed the ...”

“... there were spent rockets in the gutters and the scent of woodsmoke and gunpowder hung in the air.John Withington’s meticulous history of fireworks begins with childhood memories that resemble my own: his Bonfire Nights were in Manchester in the 1950s and mine two decades later in Kent, but almost everything was the same. Fireworks were the centrepiece, not ...”

“... In 1978, at a seminar on John Maynard Keynes held by the University of Kent, Raymond Williams talked about ‘The Significance of Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’. He accepted Leonard Woolf’s characterisation of Bloomsbury as consisting ‘of the upper levels of the professional middle class and county families, interpenetrated to a certain extent by the aristocracy’ with ‘an intricate tangle of ancient roots and tendrils stretching far and wide’ through those classes ...”

“... some mail through the bedroom window, among it a Jiffy bag with a book in it from a Dublin friend, John, the nephew I recall of the Unionist doctor who found that bronze pin all those years ago. In the book, Trees of Ireland: Native and Naturalised, I read under Hazel: ‘Fruit, a true nut, egg-shaped, up to 2cm long, pale green becoming brown with woody ...”