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“... of the calibre of Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox, Henry Grattan, David Ricardo, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Wilberforce. ‘What a mercy to have been born an Englishman, in the 18th century,’ mused the latter, and if one had the right class and gender and a taste for rhetoric, flair and professionalism in government, that was probably true. Yet ...”

“... and I went to Wexford for the launch of a new history of the 1798 Rising, The Year of Liberty by Thomas Pakenham. The Rising was important for us: from our housing estate we could see Vinegar Hill where ‘our side’, the rebels, had made their last stand. From early childhood I knew certain things (I hesitate to say ‘facts’) about the Rising: how the ...”

“... repertoire, to compose orchestral pieces, to write scores for ballets or settings for Dylan Thomas poems, however, is well beyond the competence of other stars in the firmament, even Paul McCartney. There have been various, normally embarrassing attempts by rock groups, or ex-members of rock groups going solo, to explore musical ‘concepts’ and ...”

“... glamour and splendour. Among the more solid figures who appear on this stage from time to time are Thomas Hardy, visited more than once in Dorchester: Tea at Max Gate. Lady Stacie there, a descendant of R.B. Sheridan – and a fashionable lady, formerly a great beauty. She gushed to T.H. about his novels at the ...”

“... 1798, Pitt introduced income tax. This was not a strikingly original conception. Two years earlier Thomas Love Peacock, aged 11, had written that while he did not wish ‘Mr Pitt’s removal from his exalted station’, he thought Pitt ‘would have acted more in conformity with the wishes of the People had he taxed everyone according to their ...”

“... same reason. He was also the undeclared reviewer of one of his own novels in the Yorkshire Post. Thomas Gray’s Elegy, the most frequently reprinted poem of 18th-century England, was published anonymously. With becoming modesty, Sense and Sensibility was advertised as ‘By a Lady’, a common enough ascription at the time. None of Austen’s other novels ...”

“... is that they were written, not by some blimpish country gentleman, but by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, former pacifist, scourge of the Establishment and Irish patriot. Later, as Wellington led the offensive on the Continent and the Navy gobbled up sugar islands, the English continued – quite genuinely and without any sense of contradiction – to see ...”

“... in Spender’s autobiography, ‘Harry Watson’ by Worsley and ‘a secretary’ by Hugh Thomas in his history of the Spanish Civil War). The relationship went sour, Spender married, and Tony-Jimmy-Harry, fired by the doctrines he had picked up from his intellectual friends, enlisted in the International Brigade. In Spain, he was traumatised by ...”

“... distinctive qualities of ‘keenness, generosity and a sexless intellect’, he aligned him with Sheridan, Goldsmith and Shaw in seeing him as a clown figure. The implied parallel is with Tom Moore, that paradigm of the Irish artist as entryist, entertainer and harmless fool. But the comparison cannot explain the tragically symbolic pattern of Wilde’s ...”

“... books, the printer’s name and location could be disguised by the use of a false imprint.For Thomas Keymer in his beautifully detailed history, such strategies of evasion are one of the things that make seditious literary texts worth reading, forms of energetic ‘creativity and rhetorical complexity’ for which, perhaps counterintuitively, we have the ...”

“... Irish century that escaped from darkness and confusion’. Swift, Berkeley, Burke, Goldsmith and Sheridan: all these stood for clarity of thought, while Dublin gaiety, Belfast liberalism, and the sense of national consequence acquired at Dungannon, all contributed something to the Yeatsian image of a mellow era. That this particular form of Irishness was ...”

“... 1972 to his death in 1977. With Hardwick he had a daughter, Harriet, and with Blackwood a son, Sheridan; he was also stepfather to Blackwood’s three daughters. Towards the end of his marriage to Stafford and throughout his years with Hardwick, Lowell often also had a ‘girl’, as he put it, for whom he imagined leaving his wife. In 1954, Lowell ...”

“... monarch. It was not always so. Whatever else has been said about the first Elizabeth (one recalls Sheridan’s ‘no scandal about Queen Elizabeth I hope?’) no one has ever complimented her on being dull. In sending her royal brother Edward VI her youthful likeness, soon to be hidden for ever behind the iconic mask of royalty, she apologised for her ...”

“... the abandoned child in The Death of the Heart (1938), is to be stored for a year with her brother Thomas Quayne and his wife, Anna, in their desirable residence at 2 Windsor Terrace, Regent’s Park, in the expectation either that they might grow to like her, or that she’ll somehow acquire a husband (she’s sixteen). If all else fails, Portia will ‘go ...”

“... abolished after the Mutiny. Nothing exceeds the raw passion of the denunciations by Burke and Sheridan and, it is often forgotten, by Adam Smith too, on the greed and duplicity of the nabobs in general, and Warren Hastings in particular. As a young man, Lytton Strachey admired Hastings and wrote a long thesis on him, while dismissing Burke as ‘an ...”