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“... The Quattro Cento, now reissued along with it – would establish Stokes as a respected voice in English art-writing until his death forty years later. Stones of Rimini is decidedly the more compelling performance. Its opening lines step forward with a cool swagger, toying with Virgilian cadences: ‘I write of stone. I write of Italy where stone is ...”

“... Oscars) is in this sense the ideal Goldcrest film: classy, thoughtful, historical and English (even Ghandi was one of us). It had no ‘sex or gratuitous violence’, Jake Eberts says, and it appealed ‘to all age groups and audiences’. ‘In our view,’ Eberts continues, ‘it was like Gone with the Wind.’ Only ...”

“... many historians, including both Dr Sharpe and myself, were moving away from the Whig picture of English history in which Charles and his regime appeared simply as a roadblock on the way to the future. Familiar evidence, on rereading, came to have a very different appearance from that previously credited to it. Dr Sharpe has carried this process further than ...”

“... of King James VI and I. By 1605-8, the likely date of Timon, the Scottish king had been on the English throne for several years, and a pattern had been established. He bought the loyalty of the nobility and the affection of handsome young men with jewels, gold vessels and the like. The surplus left by Elizabeth turned into a deficit of £600,000, an ...”

“... own Plantagenet relations. She is the daughter of a duke and the niece of two kings, Edward IV and Richard III. On her wrist, emblematic, is a small barrel. Her father was Shakespeare’s ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’, who died in the Tower of London at the age of 29, attainted for treason and supposedly drowned in a butt of malmsey. The ...”

“... In the course of the agitation against the Corn Laws in the early 1840s, the movement’s leaders, Richard Cobden and John Bright, gave encouragement to a proposal by a young Scotsman, James Wilson, to set up a weekly newspaper that would argue for the cause of free trade. But Wilson had no intention of being a mouthpiece for the Anti-Corn Law ...”

“... semiotics and deconstruction. We have had analyses of his work by Charles Mauron, Jean-Pierre Richard, Robert Greer Cohn, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Leo Bersani, Malcolm Bowie and others. It might seem surprising, therefore, not to find a single full-length biography published between Henri Mondor’s 1941 Vie de Mallarmé and Gordon ...”

“... restored Bourbons had become archivist of the police records of Paris and hence a benefactor of Richard Cobb and readers of his Death in Paris (1978). The records of suicide caught Peuchet’s eye, and he had a line on it. The line was to defend suicides against the customary condemnation by claiming, like Thomas Hood in ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, that ...”

“... exactly – and get it right.’ But, she says, ‘for the modern British – more to the point, English – novelist, this notion of truth is a little obscured and inaccessible.’ Historical novels and ‘books on “important” subjects’ are popular because they allow readers and writers to ‘evade the question’ of lived experience: What we do not ...”

“... In 1950 a venerable, once highly successful, long-ailing magazine quietly expired. Richard Usborne, the assistant editor in its dying days, later recalled an aficionado’s touching reaction. ‘When the Strand finally folded in 1950, my old sixth-form master wrote to me regretfully: “I loved the dear old Strand ...”

“... days later.Not a Novel is a selection of Erpenbeck’s occasional writings from 1999 to 2018. The English edition, translated by Kurt Beals, is less than half the length of the original. It contains memoir, pieces on writers Anglophone editors might have heard of (Hans Fallada, Thomas Mann, Walter Kempowski, Ovid) and two forays into social criticism. It’s ...”

“... the Arts Council in 1946. ‘State patronage of the arts has crept in. It has happened in a very English, informal, unostentatious way – half-baked if you like. A semi-independent body is provided with modest funds.’ Modest, too, was the almost passive role which the Arts Council adopted as a conduit between artist and public: a policy, Margaret Garlake ...”

“... the Morris Minor was exported and manufactured under licence abroad, but it was so emphatically English in style and conception that its popularity was mostly confined to countries of the Empire and Commonwealth. The Beetle, by contrast, achieved large sales in the United States and was still being manufactured in Mexico after the turn of the ...”

“... a centre of metropolitan science. If – in Joseph Priestley’s over-quoted phrase – the rotten English hierarchy had ‘equal reason to tremble even at an air pump’, these shudders might be stilled by a spark coil or a Faraday cage. Despite this, Faraday was not a Tory. Throughout his career he took great care to triangulate what seems to have been (at ...”

“... of women was exceptional.’ But unfortunately, ‘new forms of slavery appeared, the English arrived with their capital, their companies, their people. The real development of Paraguay was destroyed by the genocidal struggle of the War of the Triple Alliance, and again by the Chaco War of the 1930s.’ Paraguayan history has been marked by ...”