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“... 1981, and the death penalty was not formally abolished until 1987. This is the capsule version of Richard Evans’s important new book, trying to do justice to which makes one feel like a hapless contestant in Monty Python’s summarising-Proust competition. The central theme is clear enough: capital punishment was and is the symbol of political ...”

“... Richard Cobb, who died last year at the age of 79, began his career as a historian of Revolutionary France. When I first met him, in 1968, he was widely thought to be able to write only in French, but as time went on a strong personal vein and a taste for high comedy widened the scope of his writing and revealed a highly distinctive English style: intricate perceptions and sensations set down in long, baroque sentences, full of Gallicisms, argot and incantatory lists of French and English place-names ...”

“... that cartoon for long enough; a typical effort, as one of them said, would show Mr Punch in white flannels greeting a cricketing kangaroo with ‘Oh, jolly well played, sir!’ It is not a subject on which one likes to dwell. But Punch paid well, which was a valuable bonus when one’s income fell to a shilling a day in time of war; and its prestige was ...”

“... warfare’ as ‘the supreme proof of manhood’. That manliest of men, the Elizabethan hero Sir Richard Grenville, dining with the Spanish sea captains who had captured him, proved the robust superiority of the Englishman to the Don by chewing his wineglass and swallowing the pieces, ‘the blood pouring out of his mouth’. But this military ideal ...”

“... Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a Matisse. He at once began to paint in oils, but soon discovered that he lacked talent and began to write about art instead, devoting himself thenceforth to the black and white of the page. A left-wing ...”

“... finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt than had been believed. The Conservative pundit Richard Brookhiser gave us Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington (1996) in order to paint a portrait of integrity and rectitude as an exemplar of what was wanting in the Clinton White House. Books about Franklin ...”

“... Quayle’s buddy Robert Owen, firing off memos from his state-of-the-art crisis centre in the White House. And then there was Oliver North the thug, drafting directives that authorised CIA operatives ‘to “neutralise” terrorists’, supporting ‘pre-emptive strikes’ against Arab states or leaders whom America thought responsible for such ...”

“... for 1996, then 1998, then spring, summer, autumn and now late December 1999. An interesting white-knuckle ride for the politicians. The line has soaked up, so far, around £3.3 billion, but its apologists (cursing critics as spoil-sports) speak airily of how all major construction projects come in a whisker over budget. Look at the Channel Tunnel, the ...”

“... fiction, rather than visiting Joan Crawford in her film-set caravan, accompanied by Lord Snowdon. Richard Wollheim and Colin McInnes had been overheard talking about him on the balcony at a party. ‘There we were,’ said McInnes afterwards, ‘like two Chinese civil servants in the snow, talking about the Emperor.’ He shared an office with Meriel ...”

“... were bared almost to the hips where the while fringes of her drawers were like feathering of soft white down ... Her bosom was as a bird’s, soft and slight, slight and soft as the breast of some dark-plumaged dove. But her long fair hair was girlish: and girlish, and touched with the wonder of mortal beauty, her face.   She was alone and still, gazing ...”

“... late April. ‘Why isn’t anybody stopping these looters?’ ‘By the time Colin gets to the White House for the meeting, this had better be fixed.’ ‘We need to find out what he knows,’ I directed the team. ‘What are our options?’ ‘Damn right,’ I said. ‘Where the hell is Ashcroft?’ I asked. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘This is the right ...”

“... and probably one of the worst’. After cross-breeding they would eventually become the Large White and Landrace of modern herds. Among these ‘middle-breed’ pigs we may notice Lord of the Wassail, the first middle-breed boar to take a prize at the Royal Smithfield Show. The bristles of his coat were eight and a half inches long (his breeder, a keen ...”

“... his assisting in his mother’s school; his marriage to his high-school sweetheart, Elinor White; their ten-year stay on a New Hampshire farm given to Frost by his grandfather; the early deaths of two of their six children; the brief two-and-a-half year escape to England, where Frost’s first book, A Boy’s Will (reviewed enthusiastically by ...”

“... usually had to be well-born, well-off, talented and – in the European tradition at least – white. But most women philosophers before the late 20th century needed something more: access to a man who held the uncommon view that women – or at least certain women – could be serious thinkers too. The odds were long. For centuries, philosophers hammered ...”

“... The Thames underwrites a narrative of royal escapes, murdered princelings, futile rebellion. Richard II is rowed downstream to confront Wat Tyler and his peasant army. Unable to call on anything as formidable as the Metropolitan Police’s Territorial Support Group, the boy king refuses to step ashore. ‘Rough, rude men’ had been sent ‘all over the ...”