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“... as a spaniel’. To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a hollow-eyed, coughing wretch. ...”

“... his clear-eyed way he refused to substitute one allegiance for another, refused to fantasise, as Henry Adams did or Walter Pater, the substitution for the present of some past. He was as detached from what he cherished as from what he criticised. Neither the present nor the past struck Santayana as susceptible of improvement. The laughter in his books ...”

“... but a meteor had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid,’ Henry Adams wrote in his autobiography (1907): ‘All the new forces, condensed into corporations, were demanding a new type of man – a man with ten times the endurance, energy, will and mind of the old type.’ When O’Neill finally emerged on the scene ...”

“... of 1587 also saw the visit to Scotland of Guillaume de Salluste, seigneur du Bartas, courtier of Henry, King of Navarre, and the leading exponent of Calvinist poetics. James had admired du Bartas’s poetry for several years and it strongly influenced his own verse. The visit was at his invitation, though it was also used by Navarre to advance James’s ...”

“... and critic of its execution, éminence grise of the nuclear freeze movement and admirer of Henry Kissinger. Historians tried to reconcile these contradictions by labelling Kennan a realist who believed that foreign policy should follow the national interest rather than legal or moral axioms (he felt he shared this view with Kissinger). There is ...”

“... elder sister Katherine Ashley (née Champernowne), who was appointed Elizabeth’s governess by Henry VIII in 1544. Ashley was undoubtedly the person closest to Elizabeth for the next twenty years, but she died in 1565, when Ralegh was only 11, so her direct influence on his advancement was minimal. What is so striking is how rapidly this took place. At the ...”

“... tanner, were originally sent to warn two of the Revolutionary leaders, John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were staying at a parsonage in Lexington, that a British force was on its way to arrest them. Both Revere and Dawes successfully completed this part of their mission, which was based on misinformation: the British had been sent to confiscate the ...”

“... any other earthly power) could limit her indefeasible right to the English succession as heir of Henry VII, and James VI took the same position. Cecil’s hostility to the Stuart claim of absolute right is of major constitutional importance: the Elizabethan succession debates were the first of the great 17th-century battles over the powers of the crown. On ...”

“... and his girlfriend Aubade lie around, immobilised, thinking about the Laws of Thermodynamics, Henry Adams, heat death, and the imminent decline of all energy. It is a mostly charming, sometimes tiresome showoff piece, but the way it is laid out offers, as does the apartment itself, a neat diagram of how in the novels Pynchon apportions things on a ...”

“... and similar voting requirements could accomplish much the same ends as outright racial exclusion. Henry Adams observed mordantly that the Fifteenth Amendment was ‘more remarkable for what it does not than for what it does contain’. Complaining that the version of the amendment chosen was the ‘weakest’ considered, Senator Willard Warner argued ...”

“... Five years later, Rosebery bitterly opposed Balfour’s OM. It is perhaps over the top for R.J.Q. Adams to subtitle his Life of Balfour, ‘The Last Grandee’, with Rosebery lurking up the Firth of Forth getting steadily fatter and redder in the face, while Balfour remained lithe and bonny on his 36 holes a day. But ...”

“... job: ‘Jackson was married first in 1956 to Sheila Mannion. She was the daughter of John Henry Mannion, unskilled employee of the Gas Board.’ It does seem a bit rough on John Henry that he should for ever be remembered as ‘unskilled’. We learn of John le Mesurier’s three wives that they were daughters ...”

“... historical chaos into imaginative order? From Nathaniel Hawthorne on the American romance to Henry James on Nathaniel Hawthorne to Lionel Trilling and Richard Chase staking out the ground for American exceptionalism in the postwar United States, the problem for the writer of American fiction famously posed itself as a deficit: ‘no shadow, no ...”

“... fact of the new century: industrial momentum. ‘Prosperity never before imagined,’ Henry Adams wrote in 1907, ‘power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.’ Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion ...”

“... would occupy the two highest offices. In 1796 this resulted in the winning candidate, John Adams of the Federalist party, ending up with Thomas Jefferson, leader of the opposition Republicans (not to be confused with today’s party), as vice president. Four years later, the Republican ticket consisted of Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr for ...”