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“... stories. She examined the petty cruelties, as well as the racism and anti-Semitism, that drew these communities shut. In one, a woman called Adela Strangeworth, ‘a name honoured in the town for so many years’, mails letters to each of her neighbours spreading gossip. ‘Have you found out yet what they were all laughing about after you left the ...”

“... birds related to a treatise of 1561, ‘The epitome of the treasure of health’, which drew on the work of the 15th-century alchemists Thomas Norton and George Ripley, who in turn were indebted to the formulations of Ramon Llull, a 13th-century Majorcan polymath. The key to alchemy was deep reading, between texts and across the ages. Keynes’s ...”

“... revolution. In February 1652, Parliament, or what was left of it, passed an Act of Oblivion, which drew a line under deeds committed during the civil wars. After a decade of conflict, the elusive goal of moving on seemed achievable, notwithstanding the shattered castles and broken bodies. Domestic peace was coupled with the stirrings of success ...”

“... to Austin, and, to a lesser extent, her sister, Lavinia; her love of the Book of Revelation, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, George Eliot and a sentimental writer who went by the name of Ik Marvel; her passionate friendship with Susan Gilbert Dickinson, whom Austin married after a difficult courtship and who thereafter lived next door to ...”

“... slice of its traditional electorate, a desertion from which the Conservative Party of Mrs Thatcher drew a major benefit. The third is the emergence of an intellectual counter-revolution on the right. The interconnections are numerous. The ideologisation of Labour and its electoral decline are obviously related: a lot of Labour voters are turned off by the ...”

“... and law court methods) of crimes against property. ‘Pitiful necessity’ was often the cause. Elizabeth Beckford, at 70 the second oldest woman aboard, had been given – or rather robbed of – seven years for stealing 12 pounds of Gloucester cheese. Her senior was a vendor of rags and old clothes, aged 82, who was to be Australia’s first suicide. But ...”

“... were busy inventing their reputations. One night, I sat at the bar with Douglas Gordon while he drew me pictures of devils (I have them somewhere). Sarah Lucas and I walked the streets in search of more drink after Damien Hirst told Will Self to ‘crack a fucking smile’. I think I sang with Milli Vanilli. Life coaches will tell you that nothing ...”

“... at Louth in October 1536 were duly enforced in the reigns of Henry VIII’s children Edward and Elizabeth. So much for the events. But it is the interpretation of the events which has generated a small shelf’s worth of books and articles on the subject of the Pilgrimage of Grace, of which Hoyle’s is only the latest, if the most accessible. There are two ...”

“... saw his surprise, “always puts a bunch of real ones among the fake pour attraper le client. You drew the joker.”’ This extraordinary scene is intensely, and regressively, allegorical. It matters, perhaps, that the term mimesis has an ancient connection to a type of flower (the mimosa’s contortions when touched were said in Aristotle’s time to mimic ...”

“... can be as light on their poetical feet as Herrick, who was dubbed ‘the Ariel of poets’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. He refers to both music and his own verse as ‘enchantments’ as though he did indeed learn from Ariel’s blend of magic and song. But he was a far more sociable poet than the lonely Ariel. Many of his pieces – and again this is a ...”

“... as they could, but the argument they deduced from the buildings and sculpture they measured and drew was primarily aesthetic. They were pursuing ‘the study of architecture’, and the argument of The Antiquities of Athens was about taste, specifically that the ‘true Taste and Elegance’ of Greek art were superior to the ‘ruined Edifices of Rome’ as ...”

“... Others are more awkward and sometimes ill-judged, such as the digression in the letter from Elizabeth, who becomes Frankenstein’s wife, to Frankenstein about the place of Justine Moritz in their family: The republican institutions of our country have produced simpler and happier manners than those which prevail in the great monarchies that surround ...”

“... charge of her life by adopting a series of masks. Taking a cue from a distinction Kemble herself drew between her ‘dramatic’ mother and her ‘theatrical’ father, David argues that the grown woman sought to control her maternal inheritance by imitating her father’s professional discipline: while the ‘dramatic’ in Kemble’s terms was ...”

“... something which was deplored even at the time of the centenary of publication 38 years ago, when Elizabeth David pointed out that the currently available Mrs Beeton didn’t contain a single recipe from the original. That this is an odd state of affairs does not of itself make a facsimile of the 1861 book an interesting object. People buy and use the modern ...”

“... physicians and scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries – prominent among them Queen Elizabeth’s surgeon, John Banister, as well as Francis Bacon, Sir Kenelm Digby and Robert Boyle. Mummy continued to be dispensed well into the 18th century, when Robert James’s Pharmacopeia Universalis (1747) advised: Mummy resolves coagulated Blood, and is ...”