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“... rejected, and at some point in 1705 or early 1706, he left Scotland. ‘There is no evidence,’ James Buchan writes, ‘he ever returned.’ Law was born in 1671, the son of William Law, a master goldsmith who, like other goldsmiths of his time, drifted from metallurgy into finance, becoming a lender to clients. Success in this sphere enabled the purchase ...”

“... gave rise to a sense of a much broader Phoenician Mediterranean. Melqart, whose name means ‘king of the city’, is said to have been introduced to Tyre in the tenth century bc, but his cult spread widely. Like Hercules, with whom he was later identified, he was a wandering hero, credited with founding many cities. If the tophet cult divides, Melqart ...”

“... bawdiness (‘fancy him, darling?’): the effect is rather like Arthur Balfour voicing Sid James. ‘Enter toge,’ Chapter 1 begins, ‘wheeled slowly in by French and German ladies of vague conditions in life.’ Or: ‘he himself rated success in flesh to include dogs, rain rope, and also a certain condition of Asiatic elation.’ Or: ‘art ...”

“... by Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, and aware also of the new rules of the game as promulgated by Henry James with his passion for ‘doing’. Bennett greatly admired Conrad, but decided against this kind of ‘doing’. The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) was almost contemporary with Nostromo, which he called ‘the finest novel of this generation’; but his own ...”

“... Plot of 1678, English Whigs under the leadership of Shaftesbury unsuccessfully tried to exclude King Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York, from the succession. Locke’s First Treatise was also a response to the posthumous publication in 1680 of Patriarcha by the early 17th-century royalist Sir Robert ...”

“... in ages, putting aside thoughts of what had gone wrong and what would happen to him when the Great King found out, or rather, perhaps exhausted by them. What he dreamt, says Herodotus, no one knows, but the next day it had consequences. At dawn he ordered a search of every ship in the navy. A stolen statue was found in one of them, predictably a tricky ...”

“... down – and the queasy attitude of those white ‘moderates’ in the 1960s whom Martin Luther King lamented in his famous letter from jail in Birmingham, Alabama were ‘more devoted to “order” than to justice’.‘The thing is,’ Smith told Curve magazine earlier this year,everyone has an identity – historically, culturally, politically and ...”

“... Watford, a stop on the trail that begins with the selfie queue by J.K. Rowling’s Platform 9¾ at King’s Cross Station, just over the way from St Pancras, where the trains from St Albans pull in to Central London. The big producers and stars fly in for a shoot at the Warner Brothers studio next to the Harry Potter set, but they don’t stay long. Painted on ...”

“... the year Balzac wrote Cousin Pons, Verdi wrote Macbeth, Berlioz composed The Damnation of Faust, James Simpson first successfully used chloroform, the German Gustav Kirchhoff spelled out the laws of electric currents in a network of wires and Carl Zeiss opened an optics factory in Jena, Switzerland. It was the year Alfred Krupp cast his first steel gun and ...”

“... To William Henley he was ‘more the spoiled child than it is possible to say’. Henry James loved his writing – and loved mincing around its shortcomings – but saw him as ‘an indispensable light’. To others he appeared like a wraith or a tramp or a bag of bones, a hollow-eyed, coughing wretch. Henry Adams thought he looked like ‘an ...”

“... Jim has got it, but would they flip burgers eight hours a day?’ She used to work for Burger King. ‘We don’t get much diversity round here,’ she said, ‘95 per cent of the children are white and of that probably 60 per cent are blonde.’ ‘Back in the 1980s,’ Harris mused, ‘there was one black person in Fakenham and everybody knew ...”

“... projected eleven-play cycle. ‘I took it as my credo,’ Wilson wrote, ‘and sought to answer James Baldwin’s call for a profound articulation of the Black tradition that could sustain a man once he left his father’s house.’With what he called his ‘anthropological eye’, Wilson set out to dramatise the ‘dazed and dazzling … rapport with ...”

“... Like Marston before him, Middleton was arrested after writing a play which satirically portrayed King James; like Marston, Middleton was released, but wrote no more plays. It seems reasonable to suspect that Middleton was ‘put to silence’. And he is still being silenced; he cannot be heard, over the roar of the crowd hailing Shakespeare. As long as ...”

“... Fear of witches that manifested itself so widely. Grave theologians and stern lawyers, the learned King James I and the even more learned lawyer Jean Bodin raised on fragile pilings of fact a towering structure of Monty-Pythonish inferences. Europeans who knew that every village had always had its cunning man or woman who found lost objects and charmed ...”

“... several of which remain indispensable – Schlesinger was among the chief assemblers of the King James Version of American liberalism. His Cold War manual, The Vital Center, is one of the period’s shrewdest pieces of liberal propaganda. He effectively made the aspirationless politics of the 1950s look like a tough-minded creed that could sustain ...”