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“... 1533, when Cranmer was 43 years old, and he held the position under four monarchs: Henry himself, Edward VI, Queen Jane and finally Mary, the queen who had him burned. Although this book is an account of his whole life, its chief concern is with his time as Archbishop; by page 37 he is already 40 years old. When Henry died Cranmer had been his Archbishop for ...”

“... only encouraged the imputations of superficiality. ‘Looking at his portraits’, Osbert Sitwell said, Sargent’s subjects ‘understood at last how rich they really were’. ‘Le chef de rayon de la peinture’ – the department store manager of painting – is how Degas characterised him. John Singer Sargent, ‘The Daughters of ...”

“... 1970-74 diaries Cecil King records a warm relationship between his wife, Dame Ruth Railton, and Edward Heath. ‘I think he is fond of her,’ he wrote on 6 March 1971 after Ted had been round for tea, ‘and finds the friendship of an intelligent and musical woman, with no possible axe to grind, very welcome.’ Daring to Excel is not the book of someone ...”

“... overriding economic considerations. The Foreign Office itself has comparatively little say. In Sir Edward Grey’s day, before 1914, it could operate without much regard for the other departments of government: now this autonomy has disappeared, and foreign policy is only one among several ways in which Britain seeks uneasily to find a way out of her economic ...”

“... contrast to the usual quietude of that large, sombre tableland, the solitary scene of battle. So said the Inverness Courier in 1846, on the 100th commemoration. This year there seemed to be upwards of five thousand persons – ‘the size of the Jacobite army under Prince Charles Edward Stuart’, noted the Scotsman’s ...”

“... own boredom and futility that they could be comprehended in one glance.’ Comprehended by whom? Edward P. Jones is unfashionably interested in fate and endings, and likes to gaze at the wide horizons of his characters’ extinctions. His remarkable novel, The Known World (2003), owes something to The Mayor of Casterbridge: in it he broods knowingly, like ...”

“... overseas province by leftists (Guy Mollet/Harold Wilson) or weak-minded centrists (Pierre Pflimlin/Edward Heath), the military must ensure that the right sort of government came to power in the metropole. Operation Clockwork Orange was precisely this: an attempt to smear and undermine Labour leaders and Tory wets alike, the short-term aim being to prevent ...”

“... ready – almost unprompted – to repeat yet again the story of how she had hidden Prince Charles Edward Stuart in the summer of 1746, almost thirty years before, and smuggled him across the sea from Benbecula in the Outer Hebrides to Skye. That was her past. But Flora would soon need all that resourcefulness again. Ahead of her was a much longer and harsher ...”

“... The publication in Britain of Edward Dorn’s Collected Poems is a big moment, a bonfire of the verities, for the embattled tribe of local enthusiasts, veterans of old poetry wars who are still, more or less, standing. Dorn’s face is news again, live and loud, on a cover laid out like a wanted poster, or the freeze-frame of a sun-bounced downhill skier, against a backcloth of enlarged script (his own words, not the usual blizzard of corporate logos ...”

“... as duke of Lancaster. Richard came to the throne in unpropitious times. His great-grandfather Edward II had been deposed for incompetence, as he himself would be. But his grandfather Edward III was already a legend. During his fifty-year reign he won notable victories in Scotland and France, especially at Crécy in 1346 ...”

“... of Braque in the Modern Painters series, which had until then featured only British artists, said:The old scheme seemed to me valuable because it helped people to understand painters whose work they could buy, and it thereby helped the painters . . . The new scheme is entirely different because the painters you propose do not require help and their ...”

“... Some years ago, during an American Presidential election, rumours began to circulate that Senator Edward Kennedy was again thinking of running for the Democratic nomination. A young reporter had the idea of asking ex-President Nixon for his views on this development. ‘If Teddy Kennedy is serious,’ Nixon is alleged to have replied, ‘then the first thing he should do is lose thirty pounds ...”

“... the question could be suitably slanted, subtly and artlessly presented. For others on the ship had said, and presumably written too, that Eleanor had spent whole nights of the voyage dancing in the ballroom while her husband lay dying. She was left with three sons, the youngest of whom seemed to have inherited the Tennysonian ‘black blood’ and was confined ...”

“... her refusal to support vaccination against smallpox. Writing about vaccination in India, she said she didn’t ‘much care’ about it – ‘the greatest authorities in England believe that the diminution of smallpox has resulted more from sanitation than from vaccination.’ She was certainly correct in thinking that in England the decline of smallpox ...”

“... and theory as ‘exile’ or ‘displacement’, and defined with appropriate terminality by Edward Said in his essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’:Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness ...”