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“... third novel, Raditzer (1961), depicts yet another young man of means resisting paternal influence: Charles Stark foregoes joining his father’s law firm to enlist in the navy just as the war is ending. Shipping out to the Pacific, he falls under the inexplicable sway of the title character, a social outcast worthy of Camus. These three short books ...”

“... suffrage, if not in votes for women as well. These dissenters from orthodoxy were not followers of Charles Bradlaugh or even Chartists, but simply the Victorian working class. All the evidence suggests that the average secular and democratic British citizen of the late 20th century, visiting the 19th century in a time machine, would find a congenial atmosphere ...”

“... new, and no commemoration would be complete without them or without reflection upon the troubled passage of the Revolution’s reputation across the centuries. The deposition of James left the English with a guilty conscience which they have never shaken off. The men who drove the lawful hereditary ruler from the throne and replaced him by a usurping ...”

“... modernity of contemporary England and the apostasy of its people from the Anglican faith of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Given the chance, he would restore in modern dress the divine right of kings and the doctrinal authority of a state church preaching supernatural Christianity. Wright and Cowling have much in common in their alienation from society ...”

“... the doctors’ confusion about the cause and treatment of child-bed fever did little to ease the passage. Margaret at least succeeded in getting her husband to read some favourite lines from In Memoriam the night before her death; and she declared at one point: ‘I am so glad to go.’ Two decades earlier, another dying Gladstone – the Prime Minister’s ...”

“... glimpses of them in the houses of wealthier, older friends. They had names such as Hamish or Charles, wore cavalry twill trousers, blazers and Viyella shirts. Having some artisan in Lima sculpt a block of cocaine into a likeness of an Inca god then lacquer it against detection by Customs and Excise was a wizard wheeze for these dashing chaps, who, while ...”

“... More recently, the old Bossy reappeared in his Birkbeck Lectures, delivered in Cambridge, where St Charles Borromeo’s version of Catholicism was contrasted with something called ‘the moral tradition’, which was made to embrace activities and attitudes as various as blood feuds in Corsica and an inordinate love of organ music in Vienna. And then there was ...”

“... view, ‘a wonderful rhetoric of faith in the rebirth of the Sacred City of the Revolution’. Charles Nicholl repeats Delahaye’s story to the effect that Rimbaud enlisted in a Communard militia, but like most commentators, believes this is a ‘tenuous anecdote’ which doesn’t line up with the dates of Rimbaud’s visits to Paris in 1871. Rickword ...”

“... to give it a kind of pedigree within the succession of other events. There is an interesting passage early in Boswell where he quotes a letter from Johnson in 1743: the subject was a proposed Parliamentary history which Edward Cave and Johnson had mooted. This paragraph then follows regarding ‘our Historical Design’: I think the insertion of the ...”

“... poets broadcast by the BBC’s Third Programme in 1961, the prose versions by John Sinclair and Charles Singleton, and an admirable translation – again in prose – by Robert Durling, which will be published in this country by Oxford next year. Behind this we may perhaps see the influence of Eliot’s famous Dante essay of 1929 and of his own verse, which ...”

“... huge glamour on the young ministers in Lemass’s government, especially on Lemass’s son-in-law Charles Haughey, who became Minister for Justice in 1961 and then Minister for Agriculture. There was something doomed about those men, the young princes of the Fianna Fail party jostling for power in the Sixties. Two of them – Kevin Boland and Neil Blaney ...”

“... of psychic instability. Edward entered a home for the insane at 19 and died there 60 years later, Charles went in for opium, Arthur for alcohol. Septimus would introduce himself to a stranger by rising from the hearthrug where he had been lying, extending a languid hand, and saying: ‘I am Septimus, the most morbid of the Tennysons.’ The daughters were ...”

“... to public attention.James Somerset, who had been brought to England from Virginia by his owner, Charles Stewart, and managed to escape and live freely for a brief period, became the subject of a test case in 1772. Was the ownership of people legal in the ‘mother country’? Stewart had employed slave-hunters to capture Somerset and put him on a boat for ...”

“... board rarely seem or sound like Americans, and that Pfeiffer can seem at times like some rite-of-passage Etonian roughing it, and lucking out, on his adventures. The book nevertheless carries conviction as an account of what fishermen are like, on shore and off, and what the practice of fishing amounts to. The plain, clear prose is not unlike that of another ...”

“... faith was horribly called in question by the works of his (later enormously famous) passenger Charles Darwin. And there’s a third layer, a tribute to the other Victorians, in the form of Dodgson’s Alice, a mad hatter’s tea-party set in a pastoral landscape, where Charlotte (or one of the people she’s split into) converses looking-glass style with ...”