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“... the English branch of Amnesty, and, last but not least, the British Parliament. The historian Hugh Thomas had put forward to the House of Lords a motion asking the Cuban Government that Valladares be set free. This is the same Lord Thomas who in his history of Cuba wrote that the New York Times – specifically, an article ...”

“... and civil rights. In the same issue of the New York Times there is a long feature on the work of Thomas Kinkade, whom I first heard of as the only painter quoted on the Nasdaq stock index, where he has posted $125 million in revenue for this fiscal year. Kinkade sells reproductions of scenes such as a snow-covered cottage or a waterfall in the forest, which ...”

“... and tying paper flowers to the wire fencing around the Rose and the Globe, had a familiar whiff.Andrew Gurr and John Orrell’s Rebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe concerns a project conceived well before the recent discoveries. But its primary aim – to present the case for a ‘reconstruction’ of the Globe Theatre in Southwark near the site of the ...”

“... answer them. Herbert has influenced poets from Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw to Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. And not only poets; reading Herbert has made converts, even in modern times. While reciting ‘Love (III)’, the famous last poem in The Temple, Simone Weil felt that ‘Christ himself descended and took possession of me.’ A recent ...”

“... the diaspora has cultivated a harmless minority identity through Burns Clubs and mutual-help St Andrew Societies. Only in the last 30 years has there been an upsurge of enthusiasm for ‘Scottish heritage’, a spreading craze in North America and Europe which is all about kilts, Highland Games and gruesome invented ceremonies like ‘The Kirkin’ o’ the ...”

“... apocryphal notion that Anne Boleyn’s hair was claimed by Jean Rombaud, who had been employed by Thomas Cromwell to cut off her head, and sold on to stuff tennis balls. This is a crowded area of historical fiction: quite apart from the many shelves of Boleyniana and the boom in Cromwell studies, Rombaud has been the subject of a novel (C.C. Humphreys’s The ...”

“... Three women sat talking on one of the sofas. The bookshelf was packed with novels, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Leon Uris’s Trinity, The Fall of the House of Usher. We could hear cars and lorries whooshing over our heads on the Westway. ‘One woman from the tower,’ Bev said, ‘it had taken her nearly fifty years to get to where she was just before the ...”

“... Tippett was enthusing about English Renaissance music – Henry Purcell, Orlando Gibbons, Thomas Tallis – twenty years before the Early Music revival of the 1950s. He came to revere Beethoven and Stravinsky, adored the visionary American composer Charles Ives, and distrusted the postcard folksiness of British composers like Finzi and Delius. When it ...”

“... biographers Park Honan and Katherine Duncan-Jones take it for granted that the play was his. Andrew Gurr, in editing Richard II, ‘assumes’ that it was, and the same assumption is made by the editors of the Oxford Complete Works of Shakespeare and the editor of the new Arden edition of the play. Leeds Barroll, who has looked harder at the episode than ...”

“... away from his earlier uncertain styles, which were close enough to Auden and Yeats and Dylan Thomas to be called vaguely Modernist, even faintly distractive. The speech he found was in direct contrast: a weighty, easy and conversable social intimacy, occasionally spoken of later by critics in terms of the British bar parlour. And certainly, this was one ...”

“... Views on Everything (‘Yes, Terry, I do know all the lesser-known Handel operas. I told Andrew Porter he was right – they are the greatest of musical masterpieces’). I was rapt, like a hysterical spinster on her first visit to Bayreuth. Schwärmerei time for T-Ball.The Sarajevo obsession revealed itself early on: in fact, inspired the great ...”

“... religious meetings, dying in filthy prisons. Defoe was particularly upset by the death in jail of Thomas Delaune, his wife and two children, and he blamed his community for not supporting them. When the Duke of Monmouth landed at Lyme Regis on 11 June 1685, to begin his rebellion against his uncle, the new Catholic monarch, James II, Defoe left his young ...”

“... more dirtily, as befitted the scruffy student I had become, from the Trystero conspiracy in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. One gets it less, though, as one gets older. You know too much about how the world works to be so easily taken in.The way the books are marketed only confuses the boundaries further. My own three-volume paperback has the ...”

“... It would be like Fire Island without the gays.’ 13 November. A propos the Queen’s Speech Andrew Marr on The World at One talks of the future saying, ‘If the war with Iraq goes well . . .’’ the conditional not to do with the likelihood of war but only with its conduct. No one demurs. But Bush is extraordinary. Seldom can there have been a leader ...”

“... to it – literally – was all the harder. I was reminded of the words Henry II uttered about Thomas à Becket: ‘Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest.’ He didn’t order his knights to go and kill Becket, but they believed they had his blessing to do so.Now that sounds like politics. Brown​ has little to say about his attack dogs, Damian ...”