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“... Smith, sometimes he was Stewart, and sometimes he was Preston, but the most telling of the aliases Charles Stewart Parnell used to conduct the liaison with Mrs O’shea that eventually destroyed him was undoubtedly ‘Mr Fox’. Revealed by the divorce proceedings of November 1890, which, in wrecking his alliance with Gladstonian Liberalism, cost him his ...”

“... into Van Gogh, Corot into Pissarro, Constable into Monet – and Monet into Jackson Pollock. Charles Rosen and Henri Zerner in Romanticism and Realism, a book based on articles written in the course of recent years for the New York Review of Books, are anxious to defend the idea of a ‘modern tradition’ and argue that Romantics, Realists and ...”

“... Voltaire’s Zadig, and the authorities of Babylon in the mystery of the sacred horse of the king and the queen’s respectable dog. Clues, then, if they are to be fair, must fall within that area of common knowledge the validity of which a judge in court feels free to take into judicial notice: things so generally known to be true that evidence need not ...”

“... of the Magnet cast: for instance, we are asked to suppose that Frank Richards (his real name was Charles Hamilton, but Hughes affects not to know this), scouring Eton with a literary purpose in mind, came face to face with a boy called Anthony Eden and put him down on paper as Harry Wharton. (In fact, this isn’t too wide of the mark. ...”

“... to having thought well enough of it to give Banting a room and the services of a medical student, Charles Best, whose principal duty would be to carry out the crucially important job of estimating the concentration of reducing sugars in blood and urine – a simple procedure now that it has been streamlined and virtually automated by the pharmaceutical ...”

“... to see war at first hand, strolled into the trenches and found himself crouching alongside the king, who was furious to encounter him there. As Macaulay writes in his History of England,‘Mr Godfrey, you ought not to run these hazards, you are not a soldier; you can be of no use to us here.’ ‘Sir,’ answered Godfrey, ‘I run no more hazards than ...”

“... quite natural. There is no jolt, no place to pause and say this is no longer believable. Stephen King considers Jackson one of the great horror writers because she ‘never had to raise her voice’. There are no sudden twists in ‘The Lottery’. It appears to darken gradually, although in fact it does so at remarkable speed. Tessie’s reaction when her ...”

“... It made no more sense than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or monarchical ...”

“... at all: in other words, that the notion of a sustained Parliamentary opposition to James I and Charles I, leading inevitably to a military conflict fought over constitutional principles, cannot be sustained. Indeed, they look with deep suspicion at any notion of inevitability. They admit that the Crown was faced with serious problems – of religious ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... In 1989, François Furet was frequently hailed (or criticised, depending on the context) as the ‘king’ of the Bicentenary of the French Revolution. He seemed to be everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, and adorning the pages of almost every glossy magazine. Foreign reporters featured him in pieces on the celebration ...”

“... especially technical words, regardless of the language. Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the king’s works, was given an inventory of dead stock at the Tower of London that included ‘i ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii’: a battering-ram with a winding-cord too ...”

“... trials of 1794 the charge against Thelwall and his LCS comrades was that of ‘imagining the King’s death’. ‘Imagining’ was medieval legalese for ‘intending’, but in the political hysteria surrounding the trials even regicidal fantasies, expressed or attributed – the ‘levities of imagination’, as John Thelwall wrote, a touch ...”

“... times, with uneven films such as Easy Rider; or for the murders committed in 1969 by followers of Charles Manson. Those could be seen as political – one of the motivations was to provoke a race war – but the horrifying character of Manson and the celebrity of some of the victims were what caught most people’s attention. The fascination with the episode ...”

“... more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an ...”