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“... progress of the Vikings from raiders to settlers to would-be conquerors: an attempted invasion by King Sweyn of Denmark three years later was abortive, and though Norwegians continued for many years to control the Scottish islands in the far North, their effect on the British mainland was negligible.But if you take a more romantic view, the First Viking Age ...”

“... one hundred years, as the House of Windsor has evolved into a wealth-creating machine which even King Midas might have envied. It is to the unravelling of this extraordinary development that Phillip Hall has devoted the last ten years of his life, and as a result, he has produced a fascinating, indeed sensational book. Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 ...”

“... took his pulse in disbelief. Now, the monk’s mechanical likeness, commissioned by a pious king for an impetuous son, would offer similar testimony to the power of saintly bodies. The automaton resides today in the Smithsonian, reminding us of humanity’s long-standing desire to create life that survives death – an impulse once fulfilled through ...”

“... schools. It is the apparent similarity between the third and fourth waves that animates Desmond King’s Making Americans. Yet his deeply researched and closely reasoned book has ambitions well beyond its immediate subject. He isn’t much concerned with the motives or circumstances that prompted these people to migrate in the first place; and he is only ...”

“... he shaped the course of events. At the Restoration he had to counter the charge that the day the King was executed was chosen to conform to his prognostication. Through the key years of the Civil War he had forecast Parliamentary victory and royal defeat (he predicted victory at Naseby, the key battle of the war), and Royalists complained that his almanacs ...”

“... Eighty-six people died in the Waco siege in April, including the ‘prophet’ David Koresh and 17 children fathered by him. David Leppard, a crime reporter with the Sunday Times Insight team who covered the Waco story, describes well and knowledgeably the appalling build-up of weapons in the compound of the Branch Davidians’ ranch and the information and assumptions that led the two law enforcement agencies involved – the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) and the FBI – to make a series of disastrous errors ...”

“... and ill-considered) reaction against the generous concessions made to Egypt at Camp David: the war in the Lebanon was the second. Arik Sharon, who dates the start of his planning the war from the day he took office as Minister of Defence in July 1981, spelled out his views in a (Jewish) New Year issue of the muck-raking weekly Ha’olam ...”

“... Australians), they seem to have been unembarrassable. Yet that’s not how it worked over here. David Laws’s 22 Days in May, which recounts the negotiations that preceded the formation of the coalition government from the inside, explains how it happened that in our case the winners actually ended up winning. Hardly surprisingly, it’s not that Lib Dem ...”

“... royal, the infant to whom they were given was unquestionably so, being none other than the future King of Kings himself. Monarchs, this story reminds us, not only make benefactions they also receive them – which adds a suggestively majestic connotation to the otherwise plebeian notion of ‘give and take’. British sovereigns have until relatively recently ...”

“... Young Things. Think of George VI, Elizabeth and the two young princesses, ‘we four’, as the King observed with characteristic precision, ‘the royal family.’ And think of Elizabeth and Philip, whose domestic felicity was proclaimed to the world in the BBC documentary which was inevitably entitled Royal Family. At first glance, it might seem ...”

“... as the mother of Solomon, and finally as J, mistress of the sublime and the uncanny as well as of King David. In this new book Bloom cheerfully accepts the reviewer’s proposal. That the author of what eventually became the Torah should have been the relict of the unlucky Uriah, and not an Israelite, but a Hittite, was plainly ...”

“... of pastors as its collective abbot: together, they were the governors of a sacred commonwealth as King David had been in Israel. Had Zwingli’s relationship with most members of the city council been other than excellent he might have been less enthusiastic, but fortunately convenience marched with spiritual logic. When the citizens of Zurich gathered ...”

“... on sovereignty to one based on discipline. In the former, power radiated from the personage of the king and through his representatives, courtiers, magistrates and officers directed itself to the body of his subject. This system of power can be illustrated by the various techniques of punishment which involved a public display of violence to the criminal’s ...”

“... and others who hoped, that the Queen might outlive her eldest son, so that he would never become king at all. Such might have been the gloomy midcareer appraisal of His Royal Highness Prince Albert Edward, later (and briefly) King Edward VII. And it is not coincidental that many of the same things are now being said about ...”

“... from his time as Prince of Wales, substantiated most of the criticisms levelled against him as King Edward VIII, and painted a pathetic picture of his later years as Duke of Windsor, the ‘weary, wayward, wandering ghost’, shuffling with rootless opulence from resort to resort, getting ‘more tanned and more tired’. The latest contribution from the ...”