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“... place behind the scenes to defend England and promote its interests. Researching his biography of Elizabeth I’s chief adviser Lord Burghley, Stephen Alford discovered a scribbled memo from 1562, written while the queen lay dangerously ill with smallpox, ordering the privy council to appoint a successor in the event of her death. ...”

“... of an equally penniless Devonian such as Ralegh. But one may be more sensitive to these nuances north of the Tweed. More serious, perhaps, is the omission of any reference to the most important Ralegh discovery in recent years, Mark Nicholls’s publication in 1995 of the prosecution summary of the evidence in the Main Plot trial of 1603. This is not the ...”

“... John Major’s vision of Britain is history by now: a unitary state north and south of the Tweed, secured by consent, subject to one monarch and funded by a non-tartan tax system. When Major first published his views, however, in the punningly titled Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), his innovativeness upset fellow Scots ...”

“... of the ‘Lewis’ Restaurant, Main Street, Fairmount, Indiana or the Lincoln Triplex Cinema, North Arlington, New Jersey. The light is very particular in these small-town landscapes, gathered in the book Hometowns. The book is his favourite format and he has published many: Paterson, Lincoln, Hometowns, Seacoast Maine, Stone Walls, Grey Skies: A Vision ...”

“... events were the Reformation, when it lost its monks and lands and found its finances insecure, and Elizabeth I’s subsequent decision to make it a Royal Peculiar. This put it outside the jurisdiction of the Church of England, answerable only to the monarch, and left its dean and chapter in charge of its affairs. Since then, royals have turned up for ...”

“... had been impressed enough to recruit him as a scientific assistant on his voyage towards the North Pole in 1773. Two years later, Irving’s new scheme called for black slaves to plant provisions and haul mahogany and logwood in a colony on the Mosquito Coast. Equiano agreed to buy slaves in the West Indies and to assure them that, in spite of the ...”

“... and had had nearly thirty of her poems published in literary journals or book collections, Elizabeth Bishop, then 28, admitted in a letter to Moore: ‘I scarcely know why I persist at all. It is really fantastic to place so much on the fact that I have written a half-dozen phrases that I can still bear to reread without too much ...”

“... from the trade of archer. In January 1960 Evelyn Waugh declared that he and Betjeman, along with Elizabeth Bowen and L.P. Hartley, had lost their edge as writers. In these often maudlin years, Betjeman’s openness is a great asset to his biographer just as it was a considerable source of material to the poet. The flyleaf of the Collected Poems (1958) states ...”

“... a ruling class that was intrinsically and increasingly hostile to the emerging bourgeoisie of the North. He thereby situated the American Civil War as one of the revolutionary struggles over capitalist development that he saw as the distinguishing feature of modern global history. Four years later, in 1969, Genovese published The World the Slaveholders ...”

“... who was then 52 and lived in Collioure on the French part of the Mediterranean coast, just north of the border with Catalonia. He had published three gloomily introspective novels for adults, one of which had been praised by Delmore Schwartz, and he was an elegant, speedy translator, most recently of Simone de Beauvoir. Further information was in short ...”

“... seven thousand German and Dutch mercenaries. At the same time a force of more than 26,000 marched north at speed to meet King James IV’s army in Northumberland for the slaughter of Flodden. There was campaigning on a similar scale in 1522, 1544 and 1545. Even the huge windfall delivered by the dissolution of the monasteries wasn’t enough to cover all the ...”

“... was it because, by getting inside the White House, he had exposed them for failing to do the same? Elizabeth Drew in the New Republic dismissed Fire and Fury: ‘better books’, she said, would be published soon. Better books? She mentioned David Frum’s Trumpocracy as an example, with its less than thrilling subtitle ‘The Corruption of the American ...”

“... metaphor, deployed as the Volunteer is leaving the ‘broad brown murk’ of the Humber – ‘To north and south, a scanty shoreline welds the rusted steel of estuary and sky’ – welds the supposed opposites of nature and industry (and the rust is a reminder that industry is not immune to nature, that the destructive effects work in both directions). Also ...”

“... confirmed that it provided no ‘automaticity’. Blair didn’t want to hear about any of this. Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the deputy Foreign Office legal adviser, resigned; her boss, Michael Wood, stoically remained in place and subsequently received a knighthood. Unusually, the holders of the Oxbridge chairs in international law, James Crawford and Vaughan ...”

“... servants – appears as well in her view of Bishop at Harvard. ‘In the second fall at Harvard, Elizabeth began to see and take her place on the enormous, conservative, sexist campus.’ This is merely funny, since Harvard has no ‘campus’ to speak of, and since one could more truly say: ‘began to take her place in the congenial literary, liberal ...”