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“... claim to be remembered for his efforts in securing democracy, freedom of speech and fairness was John Wilkes, the subject of Arthur Cash’s informative and enjoyable new biography. Now that ‘high politics’ is taught less and less in schools and universities, Wilkes’s great political achievements, which included lowering the tone of high politics, are ...”

“... a conscious programme to fill a cultural vacuum. Lessing and Herder consciously played the part of John the Baptist, and Herder, for one, recognised in Goethe the fulfilment of the prophecy. But the picture is not quite so clear and simple as this may suggest. If Reed is right to associate Classicism with ‘ideas of literary status and authority’, ‘ages ...”

“... and constitutional stage. Could a hereditary monarch, either by violating the constitutional laws of his own realm or by physically abandoning his throne and his country, forfeit the crown? If he could, did the throne pass to his heir? If not, who had power to appoint his replacement? If it was parliament, could it also set conditions of tenure? When ...”

“... handled the countdown with more aggression and a lot more self-importance. The selector, John Hart, on their arrival in the changing room: ‘It’s going to be a long wait, boys. Time to concentrate.’ Then the coach Brian Lochore, voice breaking with emotion: ‘You’re a good team but you’re not yet a great team. If you win today you can say ...”

“... them. Amis’s most obvious assets as a writer are his ear (‘When you’re writing,’ he told John Haffenden, in an exchange published in Novelists in Interview, ‘you run it through your mind until your tuning-fork is still’) and his energy. In the quoted paragraph, both are as they always were; the lines are also characteristic in the completeness ...”

“... the daughter of a poverty-stricken smallholding family from the ‘rain-soaked’ ‘raw-bone’ laws – the high moors around Allen-heads in Northumberland. They are two poor kids growing up in the late Fifties. She wears a ‘Co-op coat’; the boy-poet’s heart is            ransomed to Pearl, her Woolworth butterfly blue plastic clip, still ...”

“... private lives considered are those of Jane Welsh and Thomas Carlyle; Effie Gray and John Ruskin; Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill; Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens; George Eliot and George Henry Lewes. This is the form in which Rose presents the couples, with the women taking precedence and preserving ...”

“... like Beaverbrook who ‘failed to secure the re-election of Churchill in 1945’. The entry on John Masefield strikes a new note. ‘In “Sea Fever” he wrote: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gipsy life,” but, in fact, he had settled in London, and in 1907 began to work on the Manchester Guardian.’ Naturally one turns to Yeats to ...”

“... their tradition had provided as many as 11 US Presidents (including Grant and McKinley) before John F. Kennedy had ever been launched into public life. There is another group of American-Irish who have been largely forgotten: Catholics whose emigrant trail led them to the American South where, perhaps in the absence of suitable religious and pastoral ...”

“... production and consumption were kept within rational limits both by Party morality and by severe laws against drunkenness. Only after 1937, when the production of all kinds of alcohol was expanded, did the rot begin to set in – initially among the ‘so-called creative intelligentsia ... and their hangers-on’. According to Pokhlebkin, there was a kind of ...”

“... process. Prodi’s administration decided that the magistrates in Milan had broken state secrecy laws during their investigation, and took the case to the constitutional court. The magistrates were furious, and argued that in such a serious case these laws did not apply. All this had the desired effect and the case was no ...”

“... were banned. On one side of the new coin was the lily, emblem of Florence, and on the other St John the Baptist, the city’s patron saint. Thus civic duty and religious observance were elegantly fused, in gold. When Jesus was asked by the Pharisees, ‘Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar?’ he had been able to take a coin in his hand, point to ...”

“... probably part of the anti-Woodville propaganda later put out by Richard III. To view Edward’s in-laws as grasping parvenus is a mistake. What’s incontestable however is that Edward’s approach to political control after his marriage was too personal, concentrating patronage and regional power in the hands of his immediate family or court intimates to the ...”

“... remained – but the style of commitment was transformed. On New Year’s Day 1839, the Rev. John Rayner Stephens spoke to a Chartist rally on Newcastle’s Town Moor. There were about forty thousand angry people at the meeting. Stephens declared himself ‘a revolutionist by fire, a revolutionist by blood, to the knife, to the death’. If the hated new ...”

“... justification of the outlaw. The judge robbed by the brothers was said to have ‘sold the laws as if they were oxen or cows’. In William Langland’s Piers Plowman is a reference to ‘Folvilles’ laws’, under which men were entitled to ‘ride and recover’ by force from wicked men what had been unlawfully ...”