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“... in the French and Dutch religious wars to England’s advantage. Elizabeth’s prime minister, Lord Burghley, thought so. But ‘forward’ Protestants regarded the proposed marriage with profound distaste. Leaving aside certain personal and biological impediments, they believed that this mésalliance would mean a political regression to absolutism on the ...”

“... Larkin recently inspired. Of that generation of younger poets represented by Andrew Motion, only James Fenton is a known quantity in America, and his renown probably stems less from his poems, meritorious as the best of those may be, than from his political journalism and celebrated daredevilry, This indifference to contemporary English verse appears all the ...”

“... apportion blame, can also be problematic. The more skilful writers of genre fiction – Le Carré James Ellroy – have progressed beyond merely pointing the finger at ‘them’ (the Russians, SPECTRE) or, failing that, ‘us’ (moles, corrupt superiors), by depicting worlds in which betrayal, double-cross and conspiracy are all-pervasive, where everyone is ...”

“... for which only 400 invitations were sent out. Mrs Astor found it convenient to take it (as Henry James would have said) from McAllister that great wealth could be a substitute for blue blood: it may have flowed in the veins of some of the 400, but the rest were instant aristocrats. What were the values of this new aristocracy, which, in the case of the ...”

“... as he is to enjoy; he did not want scholars to puzzle for a lifetime over his meaning and thought James Joyce, who did, ‘dotty’. So there are no revelations as to what he is saying, just an examination of how he says it. Nor did Waugh quite start at random and see what happened, though his early books feel as if he did: he boasted that he could, when ...”

“... on conquest.’ I believed, and still believe, Madame Tashibekova. As an MP who beseeched James Callaghan, Denis Healey and finally Harold Wilson not to send the troops – particularly the Scots regiments – into Northern Ireland in 1969, and and was told it was a matter ‘only of a few weeks’, I understand how the Russians may have felt. They ...”

“... George, the authors say, did not attend the War Cabinet meetings: he was resting at the home of Lord Riddell, owner of the News of the World, and was out of telephonic touch with Whitehall – the weather was stormy. His defenders are entitled to retort that wars are not won by sitting at a telephone; they could also point to the passage in the Prime ...”

“... radicals. Although he belonged to a different branch of Whiggery from the more francophile Charles James Fox, Pitt too was a Whig. He never described himself as anything else, and had championed parliamentary reform during the 1780s. At Horne Tooke’s treason trial, the reformer claimed that he was only repeating what Pitt himself had said a decade ...”

“... in the tradition of espionage literature (in a promotional video for Penguin he mentioned only James Bond and Mission Impossible). ‘I read very little,’ he explains, ‘so I have the audacity to write freely with no baggage.’ Decoded is far removed from any real-world spying, even though it was banned at first, under suspicion of containing – and ...”

“... Communis, held that the ‘common honest man’ had an instinctive sense of the public good. Lord Chesterfield in 1737 declared that ‘our constitution is founded upon common sense itself.’ Of course, the more common sense came into political usage, the more the parties used it as a rhetorical cudgel against one another. In Aberdeen in the mid-18th ...”

“... They were consumed not only by dilettantes or libertines, like Horace Walpole, John Wilkes and James Boswell, but also by landowners, clerics and society hostesses – Hester Thrale, Samuel Johnson’s confidante, owned several jestbooks and comic miscellanies. In this context it becomes easier – though still not entirely easy – to understand the ...”

“... Havana); his predecessor, Pat Rabbitte; several prominent trade unionists; the historian Paul (now Lord) Bew; and many writers and journalists, including Ronan Bennett and sometime Ireland correspondents of the Guardian and the Sunday Times. It would be hard to spend even a day in Ireland reading the papers, listening to the radio and watching television ...”

“... fell into sublime lakes and cracked his head on interestingly gnarled trees while Peacock’s Lord Littlebrain moved mountains of earth at vast expense to make his grounds look more natural. But by then a generation was saturated with the aesthetics of the Picturesque, which had sunk so deep as to be invisible. Keats vibrated like a tuning fork to ...”

“... to a tennis and hiking friend, ‘I want ghosts who do things. I don’t care for the Henry James kind of ghosts. I want real sepulchral ghosts, the kind that knock you over and eat fire . . . none of your weak, shallow apparitions.’ As a man who read to his adoring children, he would have loved Harry Potter and ...”

“... to it) that a ‘beares skyne’ appears on Henslowe’s list of the properties possessed by the lord admiral’s men in 1598. It is partnered there, according to the same diary entry, by one ‘lyone skin’ and by Phaeton’s ‘lymes’ and Argus’ ‘heade’. The last two stage properties were clearly man-made, but the rest? Lion skins were not in ...”