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“... acting for the Vatican. Besides being the lover of Siegfried Sassoon, Hessen was also the king of Italy’s son-in-law and fluent in Italian. He had lived in Italy for some years and was exceptionally well connected. As soon as Pacelli was elected pope, Hitler, wishing to avoid any repetition of Pius XI’s criticisms, asked Hessen to see if he could ...”

“... for the requisite extractions) on her 21st birthday, or the occasion of her first marriage. As Richard Barnett points out in his excellent text for The Smile Stealers, it wasn’t uncommon up until the late 1930s for young women to receive just such a benison – the reification, if you like, of the great relief to be obtained once those nerve-infested ...”

“... he had taken the first step on the road to the highest secular office in England under the King’s, and to a death in 1535 which resounded throughout Catholic Europe far more loudly than would Erasmus’s a year later. Even More’s death Erasmus helped to further fame, with another celebrated letter. Erasmus’s More, at a year or two over forty, is ...”

“... War begun and world war on the horizon, the distinguished Scottish scholar and editor of Donne, H.J.C. Grierson, gave a series of lectures on Milton and Wordsworth, which began by addressing the attacks on Milton that T.S. Eliot and his acolytes were mounting. The revival of interest in metaphysical poetry, which Grierson had done so much to stimulate, had ...”

“... by a statement of intent. The essays concentrate on Henry IV, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, King Lear and The Tempest. Greenblatt’s method is to juxtapose famous ‘literary’ texts with lesser-known, ‘non-literary’ texts, such as Jacques Duval’s Des Hermaphrodits (1603), Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (also ...”

“... and translations of the Book of Psalms, the original book of Dave – supposedly written by King David, the Neim Z’mirot Yisrael (‘the sweet singer of Israel’) – ‘substantially shaped the culture of 16th and 17th-century England, resulting in creative forms as diverse as singing psalters, metrical psalm paraphrases, sophisticated poetic ...”

“... protested that this was the sort of arbitrary behaviour for which Cromwell had lambasted the late king, and demanded that the unjust tax be repaid to him. Cromwell first tried to browbeat Cony into submission, then threw him in prison. Cony’s lawyer, the eminent Sir John Maynard, demanded that he be set free, and the judges in the case were minded to ...”

“... Right, as there would have been if the targets were Libyans or Cubans or (best of all) ‘drug king-pins’. Every now and then, the American Jewish Committee or the Anti-Defamation League or Morris Dees’s heroic Klanwatch outfit would issue a report, warning of the weed-like growth of ostensibly anti-tax militias who also sold Mein Kampf and inveighed ...”

“... stronger than his occasional grudging acceptance of a community of interest. With Anne came the King’s doctor William Butts, ‘whose unobtrusive services to the evangelical cause played a key part in the course of Henrician reformation’. This Boleyn-Butts axis often appears in this book competing vigorously for limelight with Thomas Cromwell. We should ...”

“... Joan Smyth par amours, and knowing her cuckoldy knave of a husband to be little better than a King Mark, carried her off behind him ... he may have done what a good knight should.’ In any case, Lewis claimed, ‘cuckoldy knaves’ apart, none of the charges was proved: ‘what should we think of Tristram himself if our knowledge of him were derived only ...”

“... law, all those declared purus idiota (a quasi-medical category ruled on by a jury) belonged to the king, who could bestow them and their property on any party able to make a strong enough case to claim them. (‘Begging for a fool’, as this was known, was often financially motivated.) Fools could also be acquired circumstantially. Those who were established ...”

“... laziest members. In ancient Egypt there was a bee hieroglyph which meant both ‘Egypt’ and ‘king’. Seneca tried to persuade Nero of the virtue of clemency by pointing out, incorrectly, that the ‘king’ bee had no sting. That Nero ignored his advice to the extent of ordering Seneca to commit suicide only ...”

“... any impact, in the sense that their names are known and recognised. One is the English explorer Richard Burton, who arrived in 1855 and was probably the first European to enter this Muslim stronghold. The other is the nomadic French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who worked here as a trader in the 1880s, and who made the place – more than anywhere in his ...”

“... people who have had information about themselves embargoed: Princess Ashraf, Alexander Haig and Richard (‘Dick’) Helms. Manifestly evasive though the diaries are, they are nonetheless exceptionally illuminating on two issues: on the last years of the Shah’s regime, seen from the inside; and on how to try to nobble Britain’s media intelligentsia and ...”

“... restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978). The records of suicide caught Peuchet’s eye, and he had a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that ...”