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“... mummy, it was hilarious,’ he has William say about a television show. ‘They had a photo of Mrs Parker-Bowles and a horse’s head and asked what the difference was. The answer was that there isn’t any.’ Morgan adds: ‘Diana absolutely exploded with laughter.’ Everybody at the royal wedding was watching everybody else to such an extent that the ...”

“... divine Richard Baxter. It figures in Gordon Schochet’s account of the Restoration bishop Samuel Parker, the enemy of Milton and of Marvell. It figures again in Lawrence Klein’s account of the politics and philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the grandson of Locke’s patron, the Whig grandee Anthony Ashley Cooper, and the contemporary of Addison ...”

“... by special studies of anonymous or bestselling authors now suitable for academic recovery, Philip Fisher’s Still the New World marks a return in some ways to an older and less suspicious idea of ‘classic American literature’. Fisher is a critic who has written extensively on realist prose and painting, and his new book is a commentary on ...”

“... Robert, Lord Rich, who in 1581 married Penelope Devereux, sister of the Earl of Essex. She was Sir Philip Sidney’s inamorata, the Stella of Astrophil and Stella. This is not a very auspicious connection, however, as cousin Rich is punningly guyed throughout Astrophil, and painted as a coarse, heartless booby. In 1564, aged 13, he was admitted as a ...”

“... the 79-year-old Lord Dundonald, who was tottering on the verge of insanity, and Sir William Parker, who himself thought he was a fraction past it at 73. Which left only Sir Charles Napier, a mere 67 but a hopeless alcoholic with a vile temper. The commander-in-chief was the 66-year-old Lord Raglan, who had lost an arm at Waterloo but had never commanded ...”

“... fairytale trappings still hinder its restoration to the pre-modern intellectual mainstream. In Philip Pullman’s Lyra’s Oxford (2003), Sebastian Makepeace slaves away in ‘a hot, close, sulphurous room lit only by the flames of a great iron furnace in one corner. Benches along each wall were laden with glass beakers and retorts, with crucibles and sets ...”

“... that many of the same things are now being said about His Royal Highness Prince Charles Philip Arthur George. For while, in some ways, the British monarchy is constantly developing and evolving, in other respects it is remarkably consistent and unchanging, and one of its most unvarying features during the last three hundred years has been the ...”

“... their own harpoon, of seamen pulled from the icy waves – with exact descriptions of local fauna. Philip Pullman knew what he was doing when he borrowed Scoresby’s surname for the entrepreneurial balloonist Lee Scoresby in His Dark Materials, since both Scoresbys manage to be at once sentimental and dispassionate polar adventurers. The original Scoresby ...”

“... it is one of the ‘little out of the way things’ that Mrs Dalloway’s dressmaker, Sally Parker, could create and yet at the same time not ‘queer’. The thing about Sally’s designs is that ‘you could wear them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace. She had worn them at Hatfield; at Buckingham Palace’; her clothes suit her character and at the ...”

“... is the distinguishing feature of slavery. (Here as elsewhere Skinner acknowledges his debt to Philip Pettit’s recent Republicanism: A Theory of Liberty and Government, which can instructively be read alongside his own book.) The neo-roman writers argue that liberty, the opposite of slavery, is not attained merely through the removal of interference or ...”

“... not from anti-clericalism but from piety: he goes to Mass at peril of his life, but in Martin Parker’s 1632 ballad, ‘A True Tale of Robin Hood’, his post-Reformation fervour leads him occasionally to castrate clergymen. His loyalty goes straight to the top; his enemy is the corrupt middle man. In order to maintain Robin as the hero of ...”

“... so serious that they couldn’t be contained politically. In a 2013 study, the historian Geoffrey Parker argued that the ‘general crisis’ of the 17th century, a litany of wars, invasions, rebellions, massacres, epidemics and famines, can be explained by the Little Ice Age. Others have seen the origins of the French Revolution in climate change, when a ...”

“... from McKelway, Brennan moved from hotel to hotel. She was ‘like the Big Blonde in the Dorothy Parker story’, Gardner Botsford wrote: she could ‘transport her entire household, all her possessions, and her cats – in a taxi’. Searching for an area in which to ‘settle down’, she tried Hudson Street, 22nd Street near Ninth Avenue, Sullivan ...”

“... Herzog topped the bestseller list that year; Bellow had already won a National Book Award, as had Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud. Call It Sleep became famous as a distinguished early entry in the new category of American Jewish fiction before going on to become an American classic. In 1963, Henry Roth had suggested in a Zionist magazine that American Jews ...”

“... middle to upper-class and purposively vulgar fanbase. In its ranks were Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and George Melly, who all later wrote of this time as of a lost Eden. Larkin’s jazz column for the Telegraph ran from 1961 to 1968, a period roughly coextensive with Mod’s quiet rise and noisy fall. Trads embraced a louche, boho scruffiness ...”