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“... a bad thing, then certainly one not worth spending time acquiring, was the no-nonsense ruralist William Cobbett, who declared that ‘the differences’ in pronunciation ‘are of very little real consequence . . . though the Scotch say coorn, the Londoners cawn, and the Hampshire folk carn, we all know they mean to say corn.’ Cobbett believed that the ...”

“... acting, clearly liked ‘this nameless mode of naming the unnameable’. She told Hunt that William Godwin, her father, had brought out a new two-volume edition of the novel on the strength of the interest generated by the dramatisation. Three more stage versions of Frankenstein had opened by early September, including the burlesque Humgumption; or Dr ...”

“... of its block. The American Folk Art Museum fell in its march west to Sixth Avenue, and only Saint Thomas Church has blocked its access east to Fifth.MoMA has added 47,000 square feet of exhibition space, a 30 per cent increase for a new total of 165,000 square feet in more than sixty galleries, at a cost of $450 million. Roughly half of this great sum came ...”

“... greater misery’, a ‘female Werther’, even a second Goethe, the still grieving widower William Godwin was forced to concede that his improbable dear was ‘what Dr Johnson would have called, “a very good hater”’. ‘Indignation,’ he noted, ‘was an emotion of which she was strongly susceptible.’ This was tactful understatement. She was ...”

“... of Jesus. He goes in for Morris dancing, you know. I’ve seen him with bells on his legs.’ ‘William Empson, gentlemen. Seldom seen out of pubs.’ ‘There is not a single living man of letters with less moral courage than Thomas Stearns Eliot.’ He was theatrical, with bushy raised eyebrows, a fondness for dramatic ...”

“... strategy] would create fertile soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.The author? William Burns, now director of the CIA, whose job involves managing the consequences of his rejected advice.Critiques of expansionism are not new nor are they confined to the left. Thomas Friedman issued surprisingly sharp ...”

“... there is nothing of that here), while social reformers made it a persuasive one. In Thomas Annan’s Close No. 118 High Street, from an album produced in the late 1800s for the Glasgow City Improvement Trust, a group of inhabitants pack the end of a narrow alley as though swept down it the way rubbish is swept down a gutter. Such ...”

“... who commissioned Leutze’s painting, probably knew and had certainly read his fellow Bostonian, William Prescott, whose Conquest of Mexico was published in 1843, and whose concern about the legitimacy of the Spanish conquest ‘lies between every line of his three volumes’, as William Truettner puts it in an essay in ...”

“... the second part of a superb and definitive biography, and by these studies of Edward Gibbon, Thomas Babington Macaulay and John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, pioneer volumes in Weidenfeld and Nicolson’s new ‘Historians on Historians’ series. As their resonant names suggest, these men were the very antithesis of poor, cloistered, threadbare ...”

“... then, at Norwich on 21 August, Elizabeth was for the first time publicly celebrated (by the poet Thomas Churchyard) as a Virgin Queen. The significance of this little piece of provincial theatre, a proposal not to marry, relates to the master-card in the 1578 strategy of appeasement: a royal match with the French King’s brother, Francois, Duke of Anjou. It ...”

“... 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 complacency ...”

“... landscape painters of the generation after his were trained in his London studio, including William Marlow, Joseph Farington and, best of all, Thomas Jones and William Hodges. Unlike Gainsborough, who took off from the tradition of Dutch landscape painting, in Rome Wilson became a ...”

“... desire for a domesticated Holy Land runs through the literary culture of English Nonconformism. William Blake’s image of an English Jerusalem is an extravagant affirmation of what Bunyan had suggested – that England and the Holy Land were not the separate places that history and politics might imply: The fields from Islington to Marybone To Primrose ...”

“... solid biographies of Eisenhower in two volumes (1983-84) and Nixon in three (1987-91). And though William McFeely won a Pulitzer Prize for his Grant (1981), that did not deter Jean Edward Smith from publishing a massive new Grant (2001), which some politicians have been reading with furtive pleasure because it finds that Gilded Age Administration less corrupt ...”

“... The guests include the composer Miklós Rózsa, two leading actors from Fedora (Marthe Keller and William Holden), and Al Pacino, who is visiting Keller, his girlfriend. The conversation turns to the curious absence of Nazis in postwar Germany, and one of the German guests remembers a line from Wilder’s film One, Two, Three. Asked what he did in the war, a ...”