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“... in the West Country. The poet’s overbearing father, Sir Richard, and his elder brother, Sir Charles, would between them represent Exeter or Devon in Parliament with little interruption between 1743 and 1812. John Bampfylde was educated by private tutors at the family home at Poltimore near Exeter, and later at Winchester. He entered Trinity ...”

“... principles; he was sent home. On the way, his ship was detained in Southern Italy by Ferdinand, King of the Two Sicilies, then at war with France. For two years he was left to rot in Brindisi castle. In a neighbouring cell, the geologist Dolomieu, another prisoner of war, applied himself, using soot, a stick and the margins of Bibles, to the composition of ...”

“... and apologists. Hitler’s American admirers included Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst and Charles Lindbergh. General Motors, DuPont and IBM did business with the Nazis. So did MGM. It’s no shock to see democratic politicians cosying up to Saudi autocrats, or Rupert Murdoch or the Walt Disney Company ingratiating themselves with China’s ...”

“... struggled to replicate both the successes and the legitimacy of Rome. The ‘Spanish Empire’ of Charles V was, in effect, one part of a much larger polity at whose heart lay the Holy Roman Empire, the self-declared heir to Rome. This was something to which Protestant England could never hope to lay claim (although before the separation from Rome Henry VIII ...”

“... plotter was a scion of the royal house of Orange-Nassau and nephew and son-in-law to the British king, but he had none of the poise and magnificence that were supposed to go with a royal pedigree. William, Prince of Orange was a mousy, middle-aged sociophobe, famous for combining blatant adultery and sanctimonious piety, and loved by no one ...”

“... nor was there any mention of the two actors, the American Edwin Forrest and the Englishman William Charles Macready, whose long-smouldering rivalry as to whose was the greatest Macbeth of the age had culminated in clashes between a 15,000-strong mob and a detachment of the National Guard. Nowadays the neighbourhood hardly looks like the front line in New York ...”

“... is likely to tell the whole story. Hence Gillray’s serial return to certain characters – Charles Fox, Napoleon, George III, the Prince of Wales, Burke, Sheridan and Pitt. The motive, the posture, the degree of deplorable wheedling would shift even as the character stayed the same.An earlier biographer, Draper Hill, judged that Gillray had ‘lifted ...”

“... travel, memoirs and numberless newspaper articles – probably running to more than 300 titles. As Charles Hugo put it, ‘everyone has read Dumas, but nobody has read everything of Dumas’s, not even Dumas himself.’ It is well-authenticated that some works which appear under the name of Dumas were not written by him at all, and certain of his rivals even ...”

“... and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark. Robert became a jeweller, while Charles was a churchman, who moved to India where he became a chaplain in Delhi as well as a folklorist. The stories contained in his book Romantic Tales from the Punjab, were, he said, of the ‘highest possible antiquity, being older than the Jatakas, older ...”

“... of them survive today. They were ordered from the engineer brothers Jacques-Constantin and Auguste-Charles Périer, and constructed by François-Étienne Calla, a former technician for Vaucanson. In his Tableau de Paris (1781-88), Louis-Sébastien Mercier described with enthusiasm the ‘curious and useful’ nature of this project, which was still then in ...”

“... was, also by coincidence, a study of a single royal event. This was Mass-Observation’s study of King George VI’s coronation in 1937 – May 12. Two hundred ‘observers’ were posted about the country and instructed to note what they observed: with the exception of those who kept a record of what they themselves felt, they were not to intrude or act as ...”

“... original complaint against Castlehaven had come from his son, Lord Audley, who had appealed to the King to prevent his inheritance from being squandered, and the fatal testimony had come from his wife. Here was a man who had betrayed his responsibilities as husband, father and head of a household in so gross a fashion that he was unfit to continue to govern ...”

“... though they were cards shuffled and dealt from some unnumberable deck: ‘Bronzebeard’, ‘the king’, ‘the lady’, ‘the French brothers’, ‘the blond one’, ‘the forked nose’. What’s more, Nostradamus seems to take perverse delight in demonstrating repeatedly the relative futility of prediction: ‘Death, then pillage: good advice, coming ...”

“... the machines people build for more everyday tasks. Even now, when the carparks at Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle are filled with sleek creations, art-directed to the max by Mercedes and Renault to convey futurity, Concorde still looks as if a crack has opened in the fabric of the Universe and a message from tomorrow has been poked through. Age ...”

“... Piedmontese. Maximilian was so depressed he dreamed of becoming Belgian, like his father-in-law, King Leopold. A Saxe-Coburg princeling whose first wife had died in childbirth before she could inherit the British throne, Leopold had been installed as king of the new Belgian state created by the 1830 revolutions. Having ...”