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“... quest for a male heir through six successive brides produced only one legitimate son, and when young King Edward died in his teens, it left Edward’s half-sisters, Mary and Elizabeth, to succeed to the crown. Both had survived various indecisive marriage negotiations proposed by their ...”

“... the decathlon as ‘nine Mickey Mouse events followed by a slow 1500 metres’, but we were young and impressionable). What’s more, Thompson got to do things that looked like they were a lot of fun: in particular, the pole-vault. Part of pole-vaulting’s appeal lay in its not being something we were able (or compelled) to do ourselves. A ditch and a ...”

“... Come on in – there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly.This is the kind of room Edward Hopper paints. There is a man in shirt-sleeves, sometimes a secretary too, or maybe a couple in a hotel room. It is night – the light harshly electric – or, as the bright, low sunlight suggests, the beginning or the end of the day. It might even be ...”

“... Geography and Arithmetic twice in the examination for the Diplomatic Service, took rooms in King Edward Street, Oxford to cram for a third attempt. Here, at riotous dinner parties, much wine was drunk and more was thrown, a special kind of port, called ‘throwing port’, being reserved for the latter function, while the sound of broken glass usually ...”

“... handsomest-bodied man in Europe’ – and the 48-year-old king’s liking for beautiful young men was well known. Buckingham was dangled before the king like a ‘piece of sexual bait’, and James bit. The current favourite, Sir Robert Carr, a flaxen-haired Scot, prevented Buckingham from being immediately parachuted into intimacy as a gentleman of ...”

“... that was at the knee. Vast savings in labour and material could no doubt have been made if Captain Edward Molyneux or Captain Hardy Amies had come up with the mini-skirt, but there was trouble enough on the Home Front without pandering to what Hazlitt, contemplating Regency fashions, called ‘the greedy eye and rash hand of licentiousness’. The Germans had ...”

“... being mentally as well as physically blind, he did not understand that in their day to love a young man was the equivalent (Socrates’ jokes reveal this more clearly than Plato’s theories) of keeping a dancing-girl before getting married in ours’. One reason homosexuality, in the Christian era, has often been a scourge and misery to people seems to ...”

“... for anything I set off. ‘Flora had met James when she was going out with his younger brother, Edward.’ Promising, because you know instantly from this that however well Edward might have done in the sprint, James is the one for the long haul. And so it turns out. ‘He had had many girlfriends and ...”

“... as duke of Lancaster. Richard came to the throne in unpropitious times. His great-grandfather Edward II had been deposed for incompetence, as he himself would be. But his grandfather Edward III was already a legend. During his fifty-year reign he won notable victories in Scotland and France, especially at Crécy in 1346 ...”

“... a white eyeball wrapped in layers of brown linen’ and the geologist tells him that chert is the young Palestinians’ favourite throwing stone: ‘During the first intifada the young ones who took on the Israeli military with chert became known as the “children of the stones”.’ ‘Elterwater, 12 August ...”

“... When his book ‘This Blessed Plot’ came out in 1998, Hugo Young said that it was ‘the story of fifty years in which Britain struggled to reconcile the past she could not forget with the future she could not avoid’. Ian Gilmour reviewed the book in the ‘LRB’ of 10 December 1998. What he says seems apposite ...”

“... days); he knew his literary career wouldn’t have taken off but for the patronage of Shaw and Edward Thomas; he also knew some thought him overrated, a ‘nature poet’ who had earned that tag by sleeping under hedges rather than the quality of his verse: I hear men say: ‘This Davies has no depth, He writes of birds, of staring cows and sheep, And ...”

“... of whoever is caught in a bush with a guardsman. (Italy has its own corazzieri: they, too, are fit young men stationed in the heart of metropolitan temptations with scant pocket money.) Of lesser appetites they are even more tolerant. But Italians do expect a modicum of discretion. And they are sufficiently respectful of foreign opinion to have very much ...”

“... many witnesses swear were finer than the ones he wrote down; or – one of my favourites – the young Saint-Saëns visiting Wagner and Liszt at Bayreuth, sitting at the piano and giving a perfect rendition of Siegfried, the unfinished full orchestral score of which Wagner had left at the keyboard as he chatted with his father-in-law. Both Wagner and Liszt ...”

“... Cameron of Lochiel, whose decision, against his better judgment, to come out for Prince Charles Edward Stuart in 1745 won the clans for the Pretender and doomed the ancient culture of the Highlands to extinction. ‘That gentleman, whose rent never exceeded five hundred pounds a year, carried, in 1745, eight hundred of his own people into the rebellion with ...”