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“... he smashed up a priceless sundial in the Whitehall Privy Gardens bearing glass portraits of the king and the royal family.) Aggravated disturbances, big and small, give his poetry its character. The opening lines of ‘Tunbridge Wells’, a satire on the ‘fooles’ who flock to the spa town, are casually respectable but unmistakably dirty: ‘Att five ...”

“... subsequently ‘discovered’ and launched as a public performer, she spoke of the time when King James had roamed the country as a gaberlunzie man as if it was just a moment before yesterday. What she sang seemed to her to be fact, or at any rate truth, and her historical sense collapsed chronology. I was moved to remember this by J.F.C. Harrison’s ...”

“... party to an almost impregnable domination of English politics. In Monty Python and the Holy Grail King Arthur rides up to a muddy peasant and announces: ‘I am Arthur, king of the Britons.’ ‘King of the who? . . . Who are the Britons?’ The ...”

“... closer to each other, and I recognised the not-quite-extraterrestrial, dumpy, middle-aged forms of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton panting their way up the hill. The glow was not, of course, from their outward perfection, nor their inner beauty and wisdom, but the result of years and years of attention from precision-ground lenses and high-wattage lights ...”

“... one of the strengths of her fiction. In The Wind Changes, an Irish novel, her central character, Elizabeth, instigates most of the amatory episodes, unexpectedly kissing a Republican leader ‘hardly [sic], spitefully and with anger’. Soon afterwards she’s having sex with the married Arion, who may be a spy working for the British against the ...”

“... of the populace, must remember, that their insolence in peace is bravery in war.’ Hurrah! As Elizabeth Einberg puts it, The March of the Guards to Finchley is ‘a work that aims to be both “serious and comic” in the fullest Hogarthian sense’. However reprehensible the behaviour of the grenadiers, the painting permits us to enjoy their ...”

“... precedent that made labour longer and harder. Who better to blame for a protracted labour than a king with a kink? Of course, the anecdote is nonsense, but it is nonsense of an instructive kind. On the one hand, we are told that history is the enemy of pain and death, bringing the 19th-century invention of analgesics, survivable caesarean sections and ...”

“... Joseph, one of Thatcher’s closest Party allies, in the early 1970s. (One is reminded of the film Elizabeth, and of its heroine’s no less momentous and politically charged declaration: ‘I have become a Virgin.’) Joseph’s remark, Thatcher writes in her memoirs, acted on her as a revelation and a summons to action. The Conservative Party and ...”

“... unknown tongue. Latin could get you an international reputation there, as achieved for instance by Elizabeth Jane Weston, ‘The Maid of England’, whose poetry – on her emotions, her life, on poverty and on the floods in Prague – won her a European reputation before and after she died at the age of 30, having borne seven children. In a list of major ...”

“... on top of the daughter he had fathered before he married, he had himself had two children by Lady Elizabeth Foster (Bess); according to the double standards of the day that, however, was fully acceptable, and the Duke’s bastards by Bess were brought up alongside his legitimate children. Rather more unusually, Bess, too, lived in Devonshire House with the ...”

“... be found, on the one hand, reverently keeping the religious anniversary of the ‘martyrdom’ of King Charles I, on January 30th of each year, and, on the other, on the side of liberty and against King George III in the Wilkes controversy ... he liked Lords but he is no snob; he liked women but not in the amorous way ...”

“... general reading public. So much for Europe, and for the few American writers – Lowell, Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop – who share European values. But American literature, on the whole, is – to a degree Bayley thinks perverse – internalised; it lives by starving itself, cultivates impoverishment, blankness and homelessness. It doesn’t tell stories: ‘we ...”

“... He is provoked by the only thorough survey of the impact of printing to have been written, Elizabeth Eisenstein’s The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (published in 1979 and abridged as The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe in 1983). Eisenstein argued – though less insistently than Johns’s criticisms might suggest – that one ...”

“... with which she must have come to disagree as the work went on. She confuses the king’s Chamber with his Privy Chamber, a point of importance in the tracking of so many careers to which she devotes such labours. Henry VII’s mythical treasure reappears; Anne Boleyn is called Marquise of Pembroke when, in fact, and most significantly, she ...”

“... than did other writing women of her time, even those in (moderately) high positions, such as Elizabeth Montagu. Her rehabilitation began with the publication of Turkish Letters at the end of the 18th century, during the Revolutionary period, when daring behaviour, interrogation of received ideas and feminine investigation of social structures and manners ...”