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“... the way he tried to maintain a prideful independence in public affairs, as if he were the last noble soul in a governing class captured by ambition and greed. Many contemporaries suspected him of reactionary conservatism, or at least nostalgia for the Ancien Régime – a charge Tocqueville always denied. But some of his more recent defenders, among them ...”

“... is blown by a tornado. Below me, fields level out to clouded grass. St Michael’s Tower – noble and lonely as the last chess-piece on the board. How I could hug a man like this! Fred D’Aguiar is garrulous. He has plenty to write about (racism, the police, exile and homecoming, the bombardments of Englishness) but not enough artistry. His ...”

“... on the heights, Carlyle’s writing has something essentially unserious about it, as of a man (so Andrew Lang remarked) ‘talking angrily and vehemently to himself’. When he was still young, Carlyle confessed in his notebooks that the world had lost its solidity for him. ‘I attend to few things as I was wont: few things have any interest for me; I live ...”

“... the man who has the best claim to have founded our modern idea of the royal family. The reader of Andrew Roberts’s new biography rejoices too. In many ways, the king’s madness is the most interesting thing about a monarch who never included among his delusions the idea that he was anything but a very ordinary person. No other writer, except possibly Alan ...”

“... against those whose power is itself illegitimate, and who consider themselves above the law. Andrew Jack points out that Vladimir Putin belongs to a special, transitional generation. He was ‘born too late to share any of the Bolsheviks’ original ideals or struggles, but too soon to be fully inculcated with the culture of corruption and chaos which ...”

“... each other. Tennyson’s ode helped this idea along, foreseeing a day when all men working in noble brotherhood would break their mailed fleets and armed towers. Never was there such faith in the perfectibility of man. Certainly it was time to make some move towards that goal. Palmerston’s gunboats had only just finished blockading Greece in the Don ...”

“... craving for wealth and power, Leopold wanted to be a despot, not a minor constitutional king. Andrew Fitzmaurice deepens our understanding of the deviousness with which he created a colony in the Congo to funnel the profits of mass murder not to Belgium but to Leopold himself. Leopold knew that Belgium’s free-trading parliament would not tolerate the ...”

“... of black families and barred whites entirely from the islands. Later that year, however, President Andrew Johnson, who took office after Lincoln’s assassination, ordered that the confiscated territory be returned to its owners. Butler and his daughter travelled to Georgia, hoping to put the former slaves back to work, but soon complained about their ...”

“... had a sort of feminine delicacy to it; he had blond hair, wavy in nature, which outlined his pale, noble brow so picturesquely … However blond his hair was, his whiskers and eyebrows were black – the mark of breeding in a person … To complete the portrait, I will tell you that he had a slightly upturned nose. Natasha Randall’s English, in her new ...”

“... exclude technology, Patriotism Appeal and the royal sod. They have on the whole excluded Kipling. Andrew Rutherford’s 1971 Penguin selection tried to smuggle him in by putting the emphasis on the later, more psychologically and artistically complex stories. But as Angus Wilson (President of the Kipling Society) pointed out in his 1977 biography, this ...”

“... to repudiate the past and make a new start.’ Of course, that doesn’t always come as good news. Andrew Sanders’s brisk and engaging dash through the reactions of Dickens, Carlyle, Thackeray, Macaulay, and heaven help us, Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, shows just how rapidly British middle-of-the-road opinion could slide into Podsnappian condemnation of ...”

“... respectful attention to death and resurrection in the novelist’s work. Coincidentally, in 1982, Andrew Sanders’s Charles Dickens: Resurrectionist was published. Dickens was the subject of Garrett Stewart’s previous book, and is the main author discussed in Death Sentences. But his line is different from Sanders’s, who locates the Dickensian ...”

“... body, ‘the essence of personhood’. The normal word for ‘beautiful’, kalos, also means ‘noble and good’ – think of all those cards at Kensington Palace describing Diana as ‘a beautiful person’ and you are getting close to the confusion of categories. The normal word for ‘ugly’, aischros, also means ‘shameful and mean’ – think of ...”

“... in its closing couplet: ‘I hate, from hate away she threw,/And saved my life saying not you.’ Andrew Gurr was the first to point out that ‘hate away’ would have sounded to Elizabethans like ‘Hathaway’; Stephen Booth added that since the word ‘and’ was regularly pronounced ‘an’, Shakespeare may be hinting in the poem’s final line that ...”

“... Parker-Bowles, it is as easy to understand why the Princess encouraged her friends to talk to Andrew Morton as it is to understand that the Prince was horrified and humiliated when Diana: Her True Story appeared. For someone as lonely, insecure and unhappy as Charles, it proved impossible to maintain a dignified silence, and the temptation to reply has ...”