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“... was a popular conceit in the 1640s. For royalists like Reresby, those who took up arms against the king were taking on God. Ann Fanshawe, the daughter of a royalist MP, who was 17 when she fled to Charles I’s wartime headquarters in Oxford, likened herself to a fish out of water. The conflict between king and Parliament ...”

“... for ‘swashbuckling’ entrepreneurs, especially ones with Northern accents. When she first met James Hanson, his gentle Yorkshire lilt fascinated her almost as much as his millions. She assumed, as Harold Wilson had several years previously, that Hanson was typical of the self-made man, the hard-working puritan who started at the bottom and worked twenty ...”

“... By the time they get to Colchis, the Argonauts are in need of a bit of luck, and luckily the King’s daughter, Medea, forms an unsuitable attachment with Jason, betraying her father and her fatherland for the sake of a crush. Jason and his crew are pursued all the way up the Danube and into the Adriatic, but Medea comes to the rescue again, at last ...”

“... policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of Eden’s periods as Foreign Secretary: he claims that his Suez policy was absolutely justified and only wrecked by wrong-headed and pusillanimous Americans. The differing attitudes of the two ...”

“... Earth​ aged millions of years over the course of the 18th century. In 1650 the Irish archbishop James Ussher had dated creation to around 6 p.m. on 22 October 4004 BCE. His estimate was based on a synthesis of sacred history and Persian, Greek and Roman myth, and so it satisfied both theologians and citizens of the Republic of Letters. A century ...”

“... One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and even lament, the things they are in the process of destroying.’ You cannot, he seems to be saying, have conservation without destruction, or a stay of execution without a sentence ...”

“... agreement, who acted uprightly and failed, seeps through, as does his dislike of De Valera and Sir James Craig. His good guys were duped and let down, while the last two died in their beds, full of Irish honours. Thus O’Connell and Parnell seem to react primarily to English stimuli, and the autonomous growth of Sinn Fein occurs in a chapter given over ...”

“... in every face I meet/Marks of weakness, marks of woe’. In The City of Dreadful Night, James Thomson’s narrator prowls ‘lonely streets/Where one may count up every face he meets’. This is what the metropolitan insomniac does instead of counting sheep. For J. Alfred Prufrock, faces are masks – ‘there will be time/To prepare a face to meet ...”

“... abbey, next to his palace at Westminster, in 1042, and William the Conqueror became the first king to be crowned in it, on Christmas Day 1066. Henry II, fancying a saint in the family, bought Edward’s canonisation from the schismatic Pope Alexander III in 1161 in return for some very welcome support. Henry III rebuilt the abbey in 1245 as a shrine to St ...”

“... to be ‘studied but in passage’. Ancient philosophy might be dead, but with the blessing of King James, a fertile new philosophy was about to take its place – ‘a spouse, for generation, fruit and comfort’ as Bacon put it – and its vigorous offspring were destined to conquer new worlds of ‘endless progress or ...”

“... The Anti-Curse, a broadside poem attacking the ‘damn’d rebellious brood’ who ‘basely did King James depose’, which attracted a heavy fine and three alarming hours in the pillory. His known output over the next few years is understandably anodyne, but he may have continued to print illegal books in secret, and after 1699 he put his head above ...”

“... candidates. The Stewarts had staying power: in the 1590s the next monarch looked likely to be King James VI of Scotland, Mary’s son, who was given an English pension to make sure that he was a good boy – Elizabeth gave him no explicit assurance. Catholic polemicists had their own ideas. Robert Persons’s A Conference about the Next Succession to ...”

“... but few of his forty-odd books have lasted, apart from his study of Curzon, his lives of King George V and of Tennyson, and his Byron, The Last Phase. A word, too, should be said for his life of his father, Lord Carnock, which he regarded as his best achievement. He wrote with care and in an elegant, limpid style: but there are times when one is ...”

“... is a message somewhere about, though it is not quite clear what or for whom. Nocturnes for the King of Naples is a tastefully confected morsel in the American-decadent mode. The hero is a fading beauty in his twenties, recalling the time of passion and fulfilment when he was 17 and the accepted loved one of an older man. He is the child of hopelessly rich ...”

“... the mew of a cat to the best music in the world. Wesley’s test for signs of spirituality in the king of beasts is not to be mocked in an age when cognitive ethologists are trying to discover whether animals have a sense of humour or can experience romantic love, and are fearlessly addressing queries such as: ‘Is it permissible to play music to dolphins as ...”