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“... taken a couple of sessions for Batoni to get the sitter’s face onto canvas – the 12 he gave David Garrick were unusual. He made no preliminary drawings; when it came to finishing the figure a stand-in could take up the chosen position, usually a variation on a settled range of elegantly relaxed poses. Batoni, who was not cheap, was inclined to work ...”

“... Then the style changes. We are surprised by a genuine page of news items reproduced from the Gentleman’s Magazine, under the heading ‘Historical Chronicle, 1736 – April’. This historical document is followed by a fictional news-cutting attributed to the Western Gazette, 1736, announcing that a man has been found, apparently ‘hang’d by his own ...”

“... property of historians rather than of the population at large. One of these academic devotees is David Hackett Fischer, the author of Albion’s Seed, a major and much-admired work dealing with the different British cultural streams that went into early American development. A professor at Brandeis University near Boston, he lives in the town of ...”

“... David Lassman, the director of the Jane Austen Festival in Bath (Regency dress parade, bonnet-making workshops, ‘Tea with Mr Darcy’), submitted opening chapters and plot synopses of Austen’s novels to 18 British publishers and agents, changing just the titles and characters’ names. Lassman was ‘staggered’, he told the Guardian, when he received form letter rejections back ...”

“... it is for us to examine – as the genuine diary, covering the years 1930 to 1939, of a certain David Peterley, scion of an ancient landed family. Peterley’s diary and other papers, so ran the Foreword by its ‘editor’ Richard Pennington, occupy a large red box in the McGill University Library, of which Pennington was the chief librarian, and the diary ...”

“... white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion, blindfold. She is supported, tenderly, by a gentleman in a black cloak and looked on by a large man in red tights who holds an axe. In front of her, between her and us, there is a wooden block surrounded by fresh straw: behind, in the shadows, ladies-in-waiting, who have divested her of robes and ...”

“... the family lived in the ‘style of millionaire paupers’, and care was taken to give the young David Cornwell the best of public school educations, and a thorough grounding in the codes of upper-class Englishness. The son of a crook, Cornwell was brought up a gent. By his own account, the young Cornwell, subjected to these strange contradictions, ‘became ...”

“... It would be an exaggeration to say that when David Hume, at the age of 26, came back to London after his retreat at La Flèche, he had already thought all the thoughts he was going to think. On the other hand, there is a sense in which the famous Hume, who lived among the learned and judicious in Edinburgh so comfortably and, one might say, so smugly in his 18th-century way, was a superfluity ...”

“... were unquestionably enhanced as authors by their criminality. However, this is not essential: Mr David Stockman, President Reagan’s first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, the OMB, has been offered a million or so for the rendering of his tenure in public office. This latter involved no known larceny or perversion of law: Mr Stockman gained ...”

“... is in one sense a male version of the Toy Princess – a New England witch makes a fine gentleman from a scarecrow, with whom the daughter of the local rich man falls in love – but Hawthorne’s odd, disturbing gift does not desert him. He points the moral of course: that good straightforward Americans should not be seduced by European ...”

“... who played the game. McKibbin recounts how the young Tom Graveney (a Player) dared to congratulate David Sheppard (a Gentleman) on his century, and even called him ‘David’. Basil Allen, the Gloucestershire captain, rounded on Graveney – ‘He’s Mister Sheppard to you’ – and ...”

“... nun explains the true meaning of the expression ‘to be in love’: ‘When one says the gentleman is in love with the lady ... it is the same thing as saying ... he is dying to put his prick into her cunt. That’s truly what it means.’ Nearly all the contributors here have a stab at establishing some kind of link between pornography and political ...”

“... the age of six. This system, the author notes, ‘provided an enormous class of ill-educated “gentleman” army officers’. By the standards of the day, however, the strictly brought-up Barclay certainly wasn’t ill-educated, and soon he was earning good marks from his superiors for his knowledge, reliability and undoubted courage in action – or ...”

“... that their major works stemmed from journeys across the Atlantic, just as they both remained gentleman scholars who never taught at a university. Yet there were differences. The coincidence of Humboldt’s death in the year On the Origin of Species appeared underlines the fact that his work had begun to seem outdated to some contemporaries. His ...”

“... years succeeded each other with placid similitude. He lived the life of a privileged country gentleman, unostentatious, comparatively retired, almost obscure.’ Nicolson’s loyal and royal life was thus more a triumph of will than of empathy, of tact rather than tolerance. And although it was received with great acclaim as the first word on the ...”