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“... backwater preoccupied him as he forged detente with the Soviet Union and ‘Red’ China in the hope of extricating the US from its war against Vietnam. The Middle East file fell by default to the then secretary of state, William Rogers, a conventional WASP public servant, Second World War veteran, lawyer and former attorney general. To the annoyance of ...”

“... so fully on Italian republican thought of the 16th century. That Locke (whose 1660 panegyric to Charles II as a new Augustus Hill may not know) drew on mid-century experience and Puritan and Leveller argument concerning original contract and natural freedom is probable. These key concepts already existed in 16th-century political thought, but their most ...”

“... but with a note of desperation not quite concealed. Another South African novelist, Christopher Hope, told me recently that ‘the bookshelves are wet with South African tears’ and reminded me of an old novel by Kingsley Amis, in which a young seducer at a party takes a girl to the kitchen and makes her cry over South Africa. Another, Ezekiel ...”

“... Roger de Piles noted, ‘took his time to draw a face when it had its best looks on.’ He painted Charles I’s Queen, Henrietta Maria, as a handsome woman – without, it would seem, losing the likeness. Yet her niece, who knew her first from the painting, was surprised to find the Queen ‘a little woman with long, lean arms, crooked shoulders and teeth ...”

“... prose-writer who had challenged tyranny and corruption and religious persecution in the reign of Charles II. Though his verse found readers, especially from the time of the Romantic movement, a biographer of 1853 could still suggest that ‘few’ persons had heard Marvell’s ‘name mentioned as a poet’. For most of the 20th century few heard it ...”

“... is measured on a scale, and scored by size of beard, love of jousting and trouble with wives, Charles Brandon would come near the top, second only to the king he served. The subtitle of Steven Gunn’s scholarly biography describes its subject as ‘Henry VIII’s Closest Friend’. What a prospect of damp-palmed horror that phrase evokes! The knocking of ...”

“... both in Lebanon and in the Occupied Territories and yet remain a state. That alone should give hope to those Israelis who would like to end the history of violence by withdrawing the Israeli Army and settlers from Gaza and the West Bank and allowing the Palestinians there to govern themselves. Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, who are now ...”

“... Harbor. Thanks to a thyroid condition he wasn’t sent into combat, so he applied to OSS in the hope of seeing action. OSS disappointed him by posting him to San Francisco, where he carried out extensive research on guerrilla warfare and cultivated Asian Americans.Lansdale finally went into the field in the spring of 1946. As army deputy chief of staff in ...”

“... the secret of eternal life, and they persuaded others to believe this too. After the execution of Charles I, the British government consulted the Venetian ambassador on the question of how republics survived. The traditional answer, which received its classic formulation early in the 16th century in a treatise by the patrician cardinal Gasparo Contarini, was ...”

“... Ferdinand and Isabella, had reluctantly agreed to finance the ever importuning Columbus, in the hope of securing for themselves some of the benefits enjoyed by the neighbouring kingdom. Kamen’s belief, first popularised in the 19th century, that the war against Granada was the ‘prototype of Castile’s imperial experience’ because it taught Castilians ...”

“... is further modified by Michael Mendle’s searching essay on the constitutional programme of Charles I’s Parliamentary opponents in 1641-2. In the emergency created by royal mismanagement, Mendle argues, MPs were concerned less to assert legislative rights than to seize executive power – though, aiming for ‘a very English absolutism’ they can ...”

“... Arabs ‘from the tyranny of their brutal conqueror’ – Turkey – during the Great War. ‘I hope,’ he went on, ‘that, remembering all that, they will not grudge that small notch – for it is not more geographically, whatever it may be historically – that small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to the people who for all these ...”

“... for Robert Kennedy and told him he had been ruled out. Did Kennedy make his initial offer in the hope that Johnson would reject it? To this day nobody knows. As for Johnson, friends and colleagues couldn’t imagine why he would exchange the tangible power of a Senate leader for the ceremony of the Vice-Presidency. So, did he really want the job, and if ...”

“... they go back to school and manage to graduate, their chances of finding work are slim. Their best hope may lie in joining the army – as has now become feasible even with a criminal record – so that they can eventually return home with some money saved. They may also come back in a coffin, or maimed, mentally or physically, but, again, in a country where ...”

“... and chapel-like alcoves; and it is dominated by a statue in white marble of the local deity – Charles Darwin – who looks down at a huge dinosaur skeleton from the landing of the staircase that rises in a double flight at the north end. Darwin’s ideas are so central to biology that there is no wall of fossils, case of stuffed birds, diagram of genetic ...”