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“... North are in monochrome pen and wash. The soft, sooty depths of the mezzotints after Reynolds by Edward Fisher and Edward Okey, the sharp unambiguous lines of Luke Sullivan’s etching after Hogarth’s The March to Finchley and the delicate precision of the Sandby drawings are not put in the shade as they might be were ...”

“... and that across the river was a Boston which still called itself ‘the Athens of America’. Edward Cummings, the father, was a man of modern outlook, if only in certain respects. A sociologist who had been at Toynbee Hall as well as at the universities of Paris and Berlin, he knew about strikes and lock-outs, arbitration, penal codes, and indeed all ...”

“... back heroism to English Protestantism after some unfortunate hiccups during and after the reign of Edward VI. Mary spent her early years as the centre of attention, the heir apparent to the English throne. In 1525, at the age of nine, she was sent off to be the figurehead of Cardinal Wolsey’s revived experiment in government, the Council in the Marches. The ...”

“... overshadowed its writing. That such talent just happened to gather in a New York City apartment is said to stand as a testament to the burgeoning power of the gay story itself, bursting to be told. It’s been twenty years since that early wave of gay fiction appeared – classics such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, George Whitmore’s ...”

“... at the tail end. The second generation were born in the decade 1901-11: Margaret Mead (1901), Edward Evans-Pritchard (1902), Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908), Edmund Leach (1910), Louis Dumont and Max Gluckman (1911). They were formed in the age of Hitler and Stalin, and, in the cases of France and Britain, of impending imperial decline. The last generation ...”

“... squares stood incongruously on the edge of open country, highwayman-haunted. There was much to be said for a mansion in Grosvenor Square, in the relative safety of Mayfair, where in 1781 Henry Thrale, the brewer, was the only resident businessman. Brewing had always enjoyed a certain respectability. The South Sea Company might have collapsed, but the Turkey ...”

“... at all. Such might have been the gloomy midcareer appraisal of His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, later (and briefly) King Edward VII. And it is not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For ...”

“... the new year, as the gruesome saga of the Emperor’s coma continued, we heard that the journalist Edward Behr had just finished a BBC documentary which promised, with exquisite timing, to blow the lid off the ‘Hirohito myth’. Behr had apparently discovered some incriminating evidence which historians had hitherto either missed or wilfully ignored. One ...”

“... The dead writers,’ Eliot said, ‘are that which we know.’ They are also, Peter Ackroyd might want to add, that which we don’t know we know or wish we knew better, agents of prodigious but incomplete hauntings. From The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde to Chatterton, Ackroyd has shown himself an adept in the speech of such ghosts ...”

“... up at Tichborne House begging for cash and, when asked whether he had ever heard of the Bella, said he had heard that the crew ended up in Australia. A few years later, Henriette placed advertisements in newspapers all over the world. In due course, a bankrupt butcher in Wagga Wagga, originally called Arthur Orton though at the time going by the name of ...”

“... the campaign (lest other candidates demand equal time, though Reagan himself has disarmingly said that he would too). For another, as the campaign has moved towards its conclusion, we have been taking with increasing seriousness the proposition that yesterday’s B-movie ham could be in charge of all our tomorrows. The campaign so far – I hope this ...”

“... Asked​ in an exam at the age of 16 whether kings should be elected, the future Edward VII answered: ‘It is better than hereditary right because you have more chance of having a good sovereign, if it goes by hereditary right if you have a bad or weak sovereign, you cannot prevent him reigning.’ By Bertie’s feeble standards, this was a flash of insight ...”

“... courage’ in the First World War, winning a croix de guerre avec palme, and, it’s said, forcing men over the top at the point of his officer’s revolver.) Few now would describe Richard in quite these terms, but still, as Fletcher very fairly observes, ‘over the years, Richard II’s unmanly character has provided the cement with which ...”

“... REMEMBER, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING, HE WAS A GREAT MAN.’ At the end of his authorised biography of Edward Heath, Ziegler writes: ‘He was a great man, but his blemishes, though far less considerable, were quite as conspicuous as his virtues, and it is too often by his blemishes that he is remembered.’ In the case of Mountbatten, we were to understand, it ...”

“... his life took place before he was born. He was the great-grandchild of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones, and was thus connected with both the Kipling and the Baldwin families; he was the grandson of an Oxford Professor of Poetry (of no great distinction, it must be admitted); and the son of Angela Thirkell, the novelist of upper-class English ...”