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“... Lincoln, and who on the same night made a savage attempt on the life of his secretary of state, William H. Seward. The shoppers were asked when they thought it had been taken. Powell is leaning against the pocked metal of his cell onboard the USS Saugus, where he was being held, his manacles just in sight; he is moodily handsome, in a round-necked ...”

“... sanitised than the published formulae. ‘Some die so bravely – I die so stupidly,’ Margaret Gladstone reportedly announced when she lay dying of puerperal fever in 1870. As Jalland makes clear, infectious fevers did not lend themselves especially well to the calm preparation a good death required. Though the devout mother who transcribed Margaret’s ...”

“... a ‘big’ subject; the only one worthy of Jenkins’s pen, he says, after scaling the heights of Gladstone. All that previous work on him, including the huge Companion Volumes to Martin Gilbert’s exhaustive official biography (‘largely unread’, Best’s publisher claims), means that it is possible to do him justice without – theoretically – leaving ...”

“... the night alone in the Chamber of Horrors for £5. He appears in Scoop, thinly camouflaged as William Boot, who is sent to Ethiopia by Lord Copper, to cover the Italian invasion. In Waugh’s novel, Boot is confused with another man of the same name. Deedes always said that this was not the reason he was picked to go to Ethiopia – it was simply that ...”

“... the first woman barrister, Ivy Williams. The first private to win a field-marshal’s baton, Sir William Robertson, is missing. Billy Smart, the circus proprietor, is in, though not Sir Alan Cobham, whose private air force introduced millions to flying, or Sir Donald Wolfit. Tom Webster, the sports cartoonist, gains his niche, but not ...”

“... 1834 a spectacular fire destroyed the House of Commons. No one was sorry. More than 60 years later Gladstone still remembered the building’s lack of ‘corporeal conveniences’: there was nowhere even for ‘washing the hands’. The latest volumes of The History of Parliament confirm the slumminess of late Georgian Westminster. While Windsor Castle and ...”

“... speak at one or more mass meetings. I estimate that I have spoken in more public halls than either Gladstone or John Bright did, if only because some of the halls were not built in their day. After about two years I ran out of cities or great towns to visit, and I also ran out of steam as to what to say. I was delighted at the prospect of celebrating the ...”

“... entertain, mislead, console etc). The selections include Queen Charlotte Sophia chastising her son William for being ‘a true trifling character’, emigrant Anne Francis on the ants and jackals greeting colonists in South Africa, Fanny Burney on her mastectomy, two reports of witnessing executions and five different accounts of hot-air balloon voyages. There ...”

“... of supernatural forces to scientific examination. Among its officers and members were Tennyson, Gladstone, Ruskin, Lewis Carroll, William James, Henri Bergson, and scores of other persons with unimpeachable intellectual and social credentials. In the 18th century, the foundations of received Christian faith, undermined by ...”

“... frankness’. Alliances with the Wahhabi were mooted seventy years before the explorer Captain William Shakespear’s momentous friendship with Ibn Saud, which began Britain’s long and dubious relationship with that dour autocracy and which ended for Shakespear with his death in 1915 while photographing the charge of Ibn Saud’s cavalry, making him ...”

“... century, the younger generation of royal males had largely forfeited public sympathy. George IV, William IV, the Duke of York (who was Victoria’s father) and the Duke of Cumberland were ‘bigamists, adulterers, squanderers of public funds’, whose behaviour was ‘repulsive to civilised taste’. Not surprisingly, it was the royal women who captured the ...”

“... by disinterested Solomons, free from prejudice, passion, envy and the desire for fame or money. William Lamb, second Viscount Melbourne, prime minister in 1834 and 1835-41, had no such illusions. He loved reading history because it pricked the pomposity of vain and foolish ‘great men’. But he also knew that historical judgments were relative and that ...”

“... which the deep past becomes more significant than the last 24 hours. References to ‘Father’ (William Wedgwood Benn) and to his elder brother Michael (killed in the Second World War) crop up frequently, and merge with moral reminders from Labour Party history. Benn’s father led the Liberal defection from Lloyd George in 1924, and stood up in Ramsay ...”

“... Men’s Association, a body which called for ‘rational’ organic reform: so organic that William Lovett, its figurehead, later turned to writing manuals on physiology, diet and anatomy. Although they drafted the original People’s Charter, Lovett’s men were soon overtaken by the Chartist leaders of the Midlands and the North: men such as Humphrey ...”

“... for such treatment. He was extremely intelligent. Leaving aside Henry VIII, Charles II and William III, he was perhaps our cleverest King since the Middle Ages. He had polished manners, and was also musical, a lover of literature and a patron of the arts. But there his virtues ended. He was selfish, idle, self-pitying, cruel and unscrupulous. Nor were ...”