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“... Henry II sought to limit ecclesiastical privileges, which had expanded under his predecessor, Stephen of Blois (1135-54), and to re-establish royal authority in the kingdom. To do so, it was necessary ‘to recollect and carefully write down’ the ‘ancient customs’ that had governed the law during the reign of Henry I (1100-35). Only in January ...”

“... made it through. Leopold McClintock, despatched by Lady Franklin to search for her husband on King William Island, tried six times to penetrate Bellot Strait during the summer of 1858 before continuing his journey by dog-sled. It took Roald Amundsen three years – including two winters lodged in the ice – to complete the first full transit of the ...”

“... who produced paintings the politics of which were far from evident. In 1949, his major patron, Stephen Clark, returned the painting Conference at Night because his wife thought it ‘looked too much like a Communist gathering’. Such experiences must have confirmed Hopper’s reluctance to speak about the content of his pictures. About this one, he would ...”

“... with tears and groans’. Even the Spaniards took off their caps, as befitted the passage of a king. The chronicler touched Huayna Capac’s finger and reported that it was ‘like that of a wooden statue, it was so hard and strong’. The last reliable record of Huayna Capac came 111 years after his death, when an Augustinian friar reported in 1638 that ...”

“... were much of a muchness. When the private cigarette parcels began to arrive, you could live like a king. I was fortunate enough to receive several at a time from relatives, friends and the firm where I worked. This enabled me to set up in business as an entrepreneur with business headquarters at my bed-space. The only drawback in being a tycoon was the fact ...”

“... and Tchelitchew, when they most needed it. Since his Oxford days – until an adverse review from Stephen Spender destroyed his confidence – he had published poetry (mostly his own) in luxurious limited editions. He also wrote one well-received novel, The Gardener who saw God. He spent the Second World War in the United States, largely in California, where ...”

“... such a transparent near-hoax, but that, they should have bothered with international law at all. Stephen Greenblatt, in Marvellous Possessions, makes a similar suggestion about Columbus’s remark that he was not contradicted – ‘y no me fué contradicho’ – when he took possession of a series of Caribbean islands in the name of the Spanish ...”

“... selection provides a sober roll-call: Ida B. Wells, Aneurin Bevan, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King, Václav Havel, Ken Saro-Wiwa. Its portrayal of the first half of the century has solidity; you are in safe, if stubby hands. There are also some poignant contributions: the broken dreams of Communism reported by former believers; Rabbi ...”

“... himself. Then came the Second World War and a sudden upsurge in reputation, with Maurice Bowra, Stephen Spender, John Piper, Kenneth Clark, John Lehmann and others going hysterical about her: a kind of trendy Stringalong situation, we are invited to judge. Then by 1954 it is all over and the balloon deflated for good. Can my dislike of this piece – a ...”

“... on, the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes. ‘To be laid out upon a petticoat’ meant to have sex. When Queen Elizabeth imagined the ultimate destitution she said she ...”

“... Piper makes us more directly aware of a great architectural tradition burning up,’ Stephen Spender said. Piper – always, temperamentally, happy to comply – went on tour around the country to document burned-out churches as well as picturesque buildings deemed to be under threat, including Windsor Castle, producing a series of dark ...”

“... adoption. At the time of our separation from Great Britain, that power had been exercised by the king, as the chief executive . . . Hence, when the words to grant pardons were used in the Constitution, they conveyed to the mind the authority as exercised by the English crown, or by its representatives in the colonies. There is only one express departure ...”

“... is a thing that happened here. I just buried a young girl whose name was Stephanie, named for St Stephen, the patron of stonemasons, the first martyr. She died when she was struck by a cemetery marker as she slept in the back scat of her parents’ van as the family was driving down the interstate on their way to Georgia. It was the middle of the night. The ...”

“... and country clay. The poet wrote until his dying day. The final nail in the coffin came from Stephen Spender, Day Lewis’s old friend and longest surviving hydra head of Roy Campbell’s monstrous ‘MacSpaunday’, who admitted, writing in 1992 at the time of the long-awaited publication of Day Lewis’s Complete Poems, that while he admired the ...”

“... chapter of the Quran to explain the ‘miraculous’ US defeat. In Al-Fil, an Abyssinian king rides an army of elephants through the desert to conquer Mecca but is defeated when God sends vast flights of swallows to rain pebbles on the elephants.Galvanised by the spectacle of the Delta Force failure, and with experience as a Green Beret, paratrooper ...”