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“... 1986 celebrations might well have prompted the publication of the second edition of Allen Brown’s The Normans and the Norman Conquest. Originally published in 1969, this book presents the Conquest of England as a part of the Norman ‘expansion’ which also colonised Sicily and Antioch. It is corrective of the Anglo-Saxon propaganda of Freeman and ...”

“... In politics, Peter Mandelson and Roger Liddle explain for the benefit of their less worldly-wise readers, ‘getting your way can require a degree of intrigue and manoeuvring.’ The straight-dealing Tony Blair would, they say, prefer that this was unnecessary and does not really ‘enjoy the modus operandi’. How very fortunate the Labour leader is, then, to be able to count on the services of one whose name has become a byword for political manipulation and deviousness ...”

“... had all been men who shielded her gallantly from any disrepute and in some cases – E.K. Brown, James Woodress – raised her to the rare air of perfection of her own fictional goddesses, heroines like Alexandra, Antonia and Thea. Her female friends idolised her and her male biographers romanticised her. Sharon O’Brien has given some facts a new ...”

“... with the young Catherine (both in officers’ uniforms) at the head of the Army that deposed Tsar Peter and made Catherine Empress. On a tour of Europe she had met Voltaire and Diderot, and been acclaimed as an intellectual and liberator. Back in St Petersburg, she was appointed by the Empress as the first Director of the Russian Academy of Science. By the ...”

“... going to happen at all, it was most likely during the futurist frenzy of the early 20th century. Peter Vergo, in The Music of Painting, examines a neglected aspect of the modernist era, when a variety of painters, poets, composers and inventors became preoccupied with the convergence of visual and aural stimuli – a utopian race towards a future of total ...”

“... to gain imaginative space, in the form of freedom for readers as well as for the writer. That was Peter Ackroyd’s procedure in Hawksmoor (1985), with the baroque architect made over as Nicholas Dyer and a 20th-century policeman somehow assuming the discarded name. Ackroyd has also represented historical figures such as Wilde and Chatterton directly, as well ...”

“... they were so much cleverer than the Romans, but they never told the Romans this.’ (That is in Peter Clarke’s book.) He won’t have been serious; but the levity of the remark suggests that the fall of the empire wasn’t upsetting him too much. The inevitability of the end of empire was accepted mainly because it was so blindingly obvious to all save ...”

“... seems to have begun in 1974 in Time was away: The World of Louis MacNeice, edited by Terence Brown and Alec Reid, but at that stage it was a tentative thing. Indeed, Derek Mahon’s essay in that book, ‘MacNeice in England and Ireland’, mentioned the matter only to set it aside. ‘He had no place in the intellectual history of modern ...”

“... modern Anglo-American publishing. Who but an agent could have negotiated the reported contract for Peter Benchley’s Island: $1.5 m. for movie rights, 5 per cent of royalties for the theme music, $75,000 if selected by the Book of the Month Club, $25,000 for every week the novel made the New York Times best-seller list, plus all the foreign and subsidiary ...”

“... her throughout her life: who could forget the image of her outside her Manhattan townhouse in a brown latex costume of coarse, bulbous forms; or the 1982 Mapplethorpe photograph in which she wears a luxurious fur coat and holds her sculpture Fillette: a giant latex phallus she referred to as her ‘doll’. It wasn’t until she was in her ...”

“... A boyish 41-year-old, casually smart in a floppy double-breasted suit of indeterminate adman brown, he didn’t look like the devil at all and kept asking me if I minded when he stubbed his cigarettes out in my saucer. Of course I minded. But I wasn’t about to say so, not there, not then. For I was drunk at the time – on the heady alcohol of modern ...”

“... Voted off the NEC in 1993, he could only watch as first John Smith and then Blair and Gordon Brown modernised the Party. That they did so from Millbank Tower, built on the site of the house in which Benn was born, added pathos to the triumph of New Labour over old. The fate of the Bennite Left under New Labour underlines the point: stalwarts from the ...”

“... on the Soviet Union’.* In 2009 the Ministry of Defence commissioned Lieutenant General Chris Brown to carry out a review of British strategy, later released under the Freedom of Information Act as the ‘Operation Telic Lessons Compendium’. Brown concluded that the army hadn’t been prepared for the occupation, and ...”

“... Travelling in the Andean highlands of Peru some thirty years ago, Peter Matthiessen observed a group of drunken Quechua Indians. ‘In this state the Quechua looks more slack-jawed and brutish than the most primitive man imaginable.’ The Indians were ‘rife with hatreds and resentments ... But they are so subdued by their own poverty, and by their failure to realise how very numerous they are, that a Quechua revolution, while one day inevitable, remains remote ...”

“... Museum of Ireland’s permanent display in Dublin, in the pages of many books and articles. (Peter Adam’s Eileen Gray: Her Life and Work, revised in 2009, remains the best introduction.) But despite the photographs and exhibitions and the commercial as well as scholarly rediscovery of her work in recent decades, I cannot quite shake the suspicion that ...”