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“... from the 16th century onwards, and the evolution of its empire overseas. And as early as 1907, Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, drew attention to the parallels between medieval and early modern Anglo-Scottish and Anglo-Welsh border conflicts, as well as the ‘ceaseless struggles’ in Ireland, and the challenges posed by more far-flung imperial ...”

“... of self-fashioning, he is an essentially Jacobean product. Sometime after the accession of King James in 1603, he gained entry to the court of the precocious young Prince of Wales. According to Bishop Fuller, ‘Prince Henry allowed him a pension and kept him for his servant. Sweetmeats and Coryate made up the last course on all court entertainments.’ In ...”

“... is – a victim of rampant conceit, whose search for humility is doomed to remain as fruitless as Lord Longford’s. Like his friends and mentors Hugh Kingsmill and Hesketh Pearson, Muggeridge mocked the world’s follies but never learned to be sufficiently humbled by the turmoil within himself. He could detect it, but he blamed the world for that ...”

“... the people of England, Scotland and Ireland; but his judgment must have been warped by ambition. James was not unpopular, and he had proved an effective ruler during his three years in power, in spite of having two Dutch-sponsored rebellions to put down. He had shown that he was not averse to violence, but on the whole his subjects respected him as their ...”

“... He​ does not feed like a mongoose,’ James Irving said of the talking mongoose that had taken up residence – or so it was said – in his remote Isle of Man farmhouse in the early 1930s. Irving told psychic investigators that his family had tried the mongoose – who went by the name of ‘Gef’ – on bread and milk, only to have their food rejected ...”

“... animation on everything the poet saw and put into words. In a sense it was much the same for Henry James, that other great equivocator of the American literary scene, and always a great admirer of Whitman. James’s prose, even the late prose, is paradoxically as physical as Leaves of Grass, and in the same way. A kind of ...”

“... of people of colour and the possible ‘bronzing’, as it was described, of the population. Lord Mansfield’s judgment in 1772 in the case of James Somerset, who had escaped from his owner on British soil, holding that he could not be kidnapped and returned to enslavement in the Caribbean, provoked much public ...”

“... Paul of Tarsus, they call themselves Paul when they are not Paul, Peter when they are not Peter, James when they are not James, Jude when they are not Jude. Sometimes they put in circumstantial detail to make their claims more plausible: so pseudo-Paul tells his gullible readers ‘I, Paul, write this greeting with my own ...”

“... school exams. If the answer was good, there would be an earnest hug, and a bellowed ‘Praise the Lord!’ Nothing was too small for the Lord’s attention. There were many good and kind people in this church. Nevertheless, it was full of punitive hysteria. It was perhaps the wrong kind of religion for a child because it ...”

“... from his old self to his present self. Referring to the death of his mother, ‘I, once a lord of language,’ he says, ‘have no words to express my anguish and my shame.’ Straightway he proceeds to revel in the survival of that lordship. ‘What I suffered then, and still suffer, is not for pen to write or paper to record.’ Yet pen wrote it and ...”

“... A typical piece of simultaneous realism and symbolism is the fact that Will’s best friend James keeps his diaries (which are secret-but-not-secret: Will reads them with James’s tacit consent) on the same shelf as he keeps his treasured collection of Firbank novels (which embody, more than any other novelist’s ...”

“... most good novelists they are preoccupied as much with power as with class. Furbank mentions some lord who said it was ‘middle-class not to decant champagne’. Attitudes to this pronouncement might be taken as a good instance of the difference between ‘unholy pleasure’ and true snobbery. As in the case of the fishknives, most people would be moderately ...”

“... By the mid-l780s Knight moved in the liberal, not to say liberated Whig circles that had Charles James Fox as a hero, and ancient Athens as an inspiration. Knight’s first literary attempt was to describe a tour of Sicily in 1777. He hired two artists to accompany him, and briefed them to make meticulous drawings of the archaeological sites. His commentary ...”

“... of these English noblemen. He was the much honoured and privileged royal servant to Elizabeth and James for more than half a century, called ‘a father of music’ in the records of the Chapel Royal at his death in his eighties; a man of affairs who, when he produced a list of reasons to become proficient in singing, emphasised first its benefits to health ...”

“... In 1598 the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to dismantle James Burbage’s Theatre in Shoreditch, which they had occupied since their foundation in 1594, so they transported it across the Thames and built their own playhouse on the Bankside. This was the building whose 20th-century replica was christened ‘Shakespeare’s Globe ...”