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“... had only five kings, one of whom, Æthelbald, was ‘the longest-reigning English monarch before Edward III’, a record (716-57) almost beaten by his successor, Offa (757-96). The kings held together what were initially separate tribes or people – the Hwicce, whose name survives in Wychwood, the dwellers of the Peak district and the Wrekin; the ...”

“... vanish, into thin air.’ Beckett’s Dying Words is not a study of Beckett’s dying words if he said any, or of Malone’s. It is about words spoken or written in the vicinity of death, responsive to a conviction of their own death – a death which does not abort the possibility of a little further life before the body is coffined. It is a study of the ...”

“... the dance. There was a Princess Margaret Set, just as the Prince Regent had the Carlton House Set, Edward VII had the Marlborough House Set, and Edward VIII had the Fort Belvedere Set: three playboys, only one playgirl. It is 15 years since she died, and memories of her are not as sharp as they were. Which makes Craig ...”

“... decaying sense but always new and stainless like the idea of rights – rights not duties be it said – yes brother so Locke hires a surgeon barber to make an incision in the Earl of Shaftesbury’s right side for like a monstrous dragon of superstition and formal piety the suppurating cyst on the earl’s liver menaced English liberty but the little ...”

“... Here is a fullish description of the ‘cowardly brute’ from Thomas Hughes: Flashman, be it said, was about 17 years old, and big and strong for his age. He played well at all games where pluck wasn’t much wanted, and managed generally to keep up appearances where it was; and having a bluff, off-hand manner, which passed for heartiness, and ...”

“... a sound guide to advanced taste in the late Twenties. Writing of the postwar years, Leavis had said: ‘The opposition to the Georgians was already at the time in question (just after the war) Sitwellism. But the Sitwells belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.’ This Osbert hated. His anti-Georgian blasts, his own ‘let us be ...”

“... he was given a knighthood and the OM; he was swept up into the arms of the Establishment; even Edward VII recognised a good tune when he heard one. By 1911, Elgar was one of the most famous men in the land: the hoped-for glory had come. But in 1920, Alice died, and Elgar the composer died with her. As the last verse of ‘The Music ...”

“... blooms in particular have been summarily attacked as weeds. The hot temper of so many responses to Edward Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) indicates that many scholars, herbicide to hand, regard Marxist historiography as a menace. Professor J.H. Hexter’s recent ad hominem assault on Christopher Hill’s scholarly integrity seems to ...”

“... Alan of Galloway, with his two hundred ships, was the great warrior of the 13th century, Edward I, ‘Hammer of the Scots’, by contrast a buffoon who built his castles in the wrong place as the result of a failure to understand sea-power. Bannockburn and Edward II get a fair hearing for a book on naval ...”

“... tells the stories of free Africans living in England: John Blanke, the royal trumpeter; Edward Swarthye, the trusted upper servant of a leading Gloucestershire landowner; Cattelena, an independent Black ‘singlewoman’ living with her cow in the village of Almondsbury, near Bristol; Reasonable Blackman (or Blakemore), a successful silk-weaver in ...”

“... of a young man for something he had never really known,’ McCarthy remarks. It might equally be said that Byrd created an English Catholic musical future which failed to come into existence; English Catholics wouldn’t have the public presence or the resources needed to use his work for another three centuries (and even then not many of them did). Byrd ...”

“... the unmarried mother, the prostitute’ became enfranchised in his narratives. Cobb, it was said, put the pimp into the Scarlet Pimpernel. In applying his gifts as a historian to his own past he became an exceptional memoirist. In A Sense of Place (1975), he recalled the first time he stayed in Paris, aged 18, in 1935: The flat shook regularly with the ...”

“... did she dislike him intensely but she had recorded in considerable detail a passionate affair with Edward Lane, the doctor at whose cure house, Moor Park in Surrey, she had been receiving treatment. The case hinged on whether or not she had made up the affair. A keen reader of novels, she had indeed invented a romance in the vein of Madame Bovary, which had ...”

“... first of the Age of Reason, he was the last of the magicians’.There’s something to be said for this opinion. In her history of English alchemy, Jennifer Rampling pays relatively little attention to Newton, perhaps because he’s an over-ploughed furrow, but does quote a startling passage from folio 13r of MS Keynes 22, an early Elizabethan ...”

“... shepherd of men as it is a barefoot goddess of Greek mythology. ‘I have come,’ she once said, ‘to bring about a great renaissance of religion through the dance, to bring the knowledge of the beauty and holiness of the human body through its expression of movements.’ Thus spake Isadora. We have no more than four seconds of Duncan dancing because ...”