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“... of piety never quite cracked. They approached several European rulers for help – including Henry VIII, who would have no truck with them – and in the end reluctantly accepted the only offer going. Malta was an informal part of Charles V’s newly acquired kingdom of Sicily. The main island and its smaller neighbour, Gozo, had very little water. The ...”

“... process gave him a model for ‘reckless narrative disclosure’ of a sort very far removed from Henry James. He doesn’t go into detail in The Facts, but Roth Unbound provides some disconcerting background information about the talking cure as it worked in this particular case. His analyst was Hans Kleinschmidt, an émigré German Jew who fled the ...”

“... fiascos of psychohistory’, Gay seeks allies among orthodox social historians. Thus Keith Thomas is praised – for ‘speaking Freud without knowing it’. What a pity that, in a letter excerpted in the notes, Thomas distances himself from ‘the Master’. What a shame that Edmund Morgan, having learned so much ...”

“... between the places where the earliest ‘Robinhood’ surnames are found, is the huge honour of Thomas, Earl of Lancaster (1298-1322), stretching right across Northern England, and down through the Midlands to Sussex. Building on this vital clue, Holt goes on to resolve the peasant-gentleman debate by dissolving it. The word ‘yeoman’ in the later Middle ...”

“... robes, clambering up and down staircases of keys or key-thumping in caverns. ‘After all,’ Thomas Mullaney writes, ‘if a Chinese typewriter is really the size of two ping-pong tables put together, need anything more be said about the deficiencies of the Chinese language?’ To many Western eyes, the characters were so exotic that they seemed to raise ...”

“... most primitive fears of the white racist imagination were not held only by defenders of slavery. Henry A. Wise, a Southern member of Congress and a future Confederate general, called John Quincy Adams ‘the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed’. Adams would have subscribed to the view that ‘all men are created ...”

“... to meet the sages of the East. In Sri Lanka, the most influential of these spiritual tourists was Henry Steel Olcott, a former Union Army colonel and theosophist from New Jersey whose profile appears on Sri Lankan stamps and who is claimed as one of the ‘heroes of independence’. After the American Civil War, Olcott grew disgusted by what he saw as the ...”

“... that Evelyn Waugh was the greatest English novelist of his generation. Certainly Graham Greene, Henry Green and Angus Wilson thought so, although they and not he won the worldly honours Waugh would dearly have loved. On the other hand, that redoubtable holder of the Order of Merit, J.B. Priestley, did not think so. But then whom would he have ...”

“... an ex-Cluniac monastery that was among the properties (they included Kirkstall Abbey) granted to Thomas Cranmer on the death of Henry VIII. It wasn’t actually included in the royal will but was part of the general share-out that occurred then to fulfil the wishes supposedly expressed by ...”

“... is what makes ‘On Being Brought from Africa to America’, in Walker’s terms, ‘sickly’. Henry Louis Gates Jr called it ‘the most reviled poem in African American literature’. It contributed to the view of readers in the 1960s and 1970s who, informed by Black nationalism and the Black Arts Movement, found nothing in Wheatley’s poetry but ...”

“... in Latin, licentia. This sort of freedom has descended to us via the plea to the king from Thomas More when he was Speaker of the House of Commons that every MP should enjoy the liberty ‘freely … and boldly to declare his advice’ – a privilege that survives today in the liberty of MPs to utter words in the chamber which, if repeated ...”

“... an unreasonable question. Nixon had flirted with using nuclear weapons in conversations with Henry Kissinger during the North Vietnamese offensive of spring 1972. When Kissinger told him it ‘would just be too much’, Nixon was outraged: ‘I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.’ Kissinger soon ...”

“... to religious reform as an avaricious scheme aimed at confiscating episcopal property. The maverick Thomas Nashe still felt it was worth making this allegation in Piers Penniless His Supplication to the Devil in 1592, when Leicester had been safely dead for four years, and Nashe wasn’t the only non-Catholic to share the lasting animus which informs ...”

“... do hate to give up their claims, however. Well into the middle of the 13th century, John’s son Henry III was still insisting that he was the rightful duke of Normandy. And in a longer perspective, Henry’s reign, and those of his son and grandson, the first two Edwards, represent a mere century’s intermission during ...”

“... the benevolent institutions you would like to outlive your reign. I often thought of both parts of Henry IV and Henry V, or of Thomas Cromwell as portrayed by Hilary Mantel. Hadrian is clear without overexplaining, honest without being ingratiating. Mavis Gallant said that the novel’s ...”