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“... but foundered trying to write about Che Guevara for the New Yorker. Briefly, he dated Carly Simon; she listened attentively, she said, ‘as he talked with the kind of fervid enthusiasm for Che that I secretly hoped he might have an iota of for me’. He was very serious, but could be very funny too. He taught at MIT for a year but decided he was a poor ...”

“... of 1258 which forced him to cede power to a baronial council. In 1263, rather than surrender to Simon de Montfort, she attempted to sail up the river from the Tower of London to join her son at Windsor, only for a hail of stones and rubbish to be thrown at her from London Bridge. She was driven back to the Tower, where her husband refused to admit ...”

“... were going on at Mile End, another group of rebels dragged the archbishop of Canterbury, Simon of Sudbury, and the treasurer, Robert Hales, out of the Tower of London and beheaded them on Tower Hill. On 15 June the rebels and the king met again, this time at Smithfield. Their leader, Wat Tyler, failed to doff his cap, instead taking the king’s arm ...”

“... and trajectory of Sendero’s revolution. It is the achievement of these books, particularly Simon Strong’s, to rip off the tags and subject the contents of the box to rational argument and analysis. The roots of the revolution stretch back to the legendary barbarity of Pizarro’s conquest, beginning with the murder of the Inca Atahualpa and the ...”

“... as well as more representative of the state of 16th-century history: Natalie Zemon Davis, David Cressy, Eamon Duffy. More privately, there is the story he tells us in his prologue about his acceding, if sheepishly, to the unspoken wishes of his dead father by saying Kaddish for him. Which seems a more human response than his refusal, recorded in the ...”

“... in 2010, isn’t present. After a Saturday bullfight in Valladolid, I went to Tordesillas with David Penton, secretary of the Club Taurino of London. He is something of a hero there for his defence of the toro de la vega, the bête noire of the anti-bullfighting lobby. There was to be a parade lit by lanterns that evening, and a toro de la vega on ...”

“... stretching upwards, but perhaps true ambition has a pair of silent claws. None of us identified David Cameron as the boy marching inexorably towards Downing Street. When he became Tory leader in 2005, I had difficulty recalling him: wasn’t he that affable, sweet-faced, minor fellow at the edge of things? I remembered him as quite handsome, with the ...”

“... early Sixties, while doing his national service in Puerto Rico. The manuscript was submitted to Simon and Schuster, where Robert Gottlieb, after dickering for two years, eventually turned it down in 1966. By 1969 Toole was an English instructor at Dominican University, working in his spare time on his PhD. A modest academic career seemed likely. But Toole ...”

“... moustache’. This view has been assailed, from opposite angles, by both of Eden’s biographers. David Carlton* is critical of many aspects of Eden’s career, and argues that his views on foreign policy in the Thirties were less wise and consistent than is usually believed. Robert Rhodes James, however, not only endorses the traditional appreciation of ...”

“... the war to help with the assimilation of the refugees. Taking advantage of her acquaintance with Simon Marks, she bulldozed her way into his business and revolutionised the working conditions of his employees. Taking advantage of her position at M – S, and translating the notion of staff canteens onto a broader canvas, she helped set up the chain of soup ...”

“... littering the sofa tables of the Manchester bourgeosie. In the 1980s, the American poet David Antin charged that ‘anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals.’ More recently, Marjorie Perloff called for undergraduates to swear off Evian, in the hope that tap-water drinkers could afford unabridged books rather than hackneyed ...”

“... Collins); ‘unobtainable’ yet ‘accessible’ (Collins again). Or to quote the photographer David Bailey: ‘She’s the kind of girl you wished lived next door, but she’s never going to.’ Many of these descriptions – perfect yet imperfect, unobtainable yet accessible – relate to a distinction often made with respect to oil painting but almost ...”

“... royal palaces, where they developed the intricate system of etiquette known to readers of Saint-Simon, to which Burke gives only cursory attention. Royal ceremonial now focused not on grand public occasions but on the most intimate aspects of private life, with the highest nobles acting out the role of household servants to the royal family. Even the acts ...”

“... of Major Ltd by Blair & Co. Nor did I expect to be reproved, however gently, for indiscretion by Simon Jenkins on the op-ed page of the Times – as if I hadn’t cleared what I proposed to print with anyone quoted directly who might have suffered in consequence, or would have dreamed of disclosing to LRB readers without ...”