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“... and idolatrous popery.A preliminary sally in July 1643, when the Parliamentarian commander Colonel Richard Norton had expected ‘much spoil and little opposition’, had ended in failure. It was the first sign that taking Basing House would involve more than strolling through the parkland and bashing down the door, and should have made Waller less sanguine ...”

“... more truly a tool than the butcher’s knife, or the hybridised orchid less a flower than the wild rose. To appreciate Freud’s point would be to overcome what William James called ‘a certain blindness in human beings’. James’s example of this blindness was his own reaction, during a trip through the Appalachian Mountains, to a clearing in which the ...”

“... in 1930, she will belong altogether to some transcendent realm of being: she will be ‘the Rose’ in ‘the Garden/ Where all loves end/Terminate torment/Of love unsatisfied/The greater torment/Of love satisfied.’ In The Waste Land, written for the most part a decade after ‘La Figlia’, and six years into his marriage, the ‘hyacinth ...”

“... and therefore could not expect to inherit, made a name and a living by his knightly prowess. He rose in the service of the Angevin kings and died in 1219 as Regent of England. His career spans the history of the Angevin Empire and can be used to cast light on its political history. Indeed it was so used by Sidney Painter in his fine William Marshal ...”

“... of famine. As soon as resources were switched to finding an anti-malaria vaccine, disease levels rose steeply. The ancient remedy was ‘Jesuit bark’ or quinine, a staple of the African explorers, but this was replaced after World War Two by the alleged ‘miracle drug’, chloroquine. Chloroquine, however, was not cheap, and exhortations from the Third ...”

“... justice of the peace, or the mayor of this city? By what authority do you ask me these things?’ Richard (‘Beau’) Nash was at a loss for a ready reply. The ‘King of Bath’, as he liked to be known, was the gamester son of a Swansea bottlemaker, a heavyweight playboy whose abundant assurance, or chutzpah, had qualified him to act as arbiter of elegance ...”

“... them? In the course of twenty years in the mid-19th century a group of British explorers – Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, David Livingstone, Samuel Baker (with his wife, Florence), Henry Morton Stanley and James Grant – slogged out on their respective expeditions through East and Central Africa, and engaged in an intense and bitter battle over ...”

“... been lost to the dead hand of over-zealous interpretation and expensive presentation. In 1855, Richard Deakin, a Victorian botanist, published a volume devoted to the species he found growing on and around the Colosseum, a six-acre site which supported 420 different plants. Deakin is one of Woodward’s many unsung heroes. The conjunction of nature and ...”

“... entangled (Partridge’s text is addressed not only to ‘Good Huswives’ but also to Richard Wistow, assistant to the Company of Barbers and Surgeons). According to Galenic humoural theory, health was a matter of balancing the black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm that swam through the body, and food was a crucial means of establishing this ...”

“... contortions … But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.’ ‘The sexual implications of the scene,’ Elaine Showalter writes, ‘are embarrassingly clear.’ The sexism of the ...”

“... with government – over minimum standards for all council housing. And although I see that both Richard Haslam and Jonah Jones credit him with authorship of the splendidly rude, punchy, near-libellous DIA Cautionary Guide to St Alban’s (1929), I am surprised that some credit doesn’t also go to what is surely the echo of that same ...”

“... 23 July 2002 surfaced in the Sunday Times detailing the conversations that the head of MI6, Sir Richard Dearlove, had with his counterparts in Washington. It contained the killer quote: ‘The intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.’ This confirmed, if confirmation were still needed, that Blair’s lie to the Commons was not a careless ...”

“... title is implicit in these lines from Book Six describing the war in heaven: now storming fury rose, And clamour such as heard in heaven till now Was never, arms on armour clashing brayed Horrible discord . . . The ‘clamor ad coelum’ becomes ‘clamour such as heard in heaven’ (and the internal rhyme on ‘armour’ places responsibility on the ...”

“... big stuff – the national plan, the new approach, to expand or die’. Industrial production rose by 11 per cent in the year after the pliable Heathcoat Amory’s 1959 election budget – a completely unsustainable gallop. Macmillan’s obsession with expansion and his utter neglect of inflation were of course a reaction to the bitter experience of the ...”

“... began to produce books. In the library Kazin sometimes sat across from his friend the historian Richard Hofstadter, who was also writing his first book, and their simultaneous composition was also a form of becoming. The battle Kazin had all his writers fight in On Native Grounds was a battle against an uncaring America, a vast industrial civilisation. He ...”