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“... 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 ...”

“... and expect you to do the cooking yourself’. Towards the end of his life, his attacks on Henry James, Katherine Mansfield – a ‘neurotic, sick woman’ – and even Chekhov, whom he’d once admired, were frequent and hysterical. For good measure, he began to make disobliging remarks about mass-educated white-collar workers. ‘They have no ...”

“... and Van Hire. 10 March. To Bradford for the provincial premiere of The Madness of King George. The Lord Mayor is present and R. sees him afterwards in the Gents, mayoral chain round his neck, trying to have a pee. His badge of office dangles just over his flies so that he has to take great care not to piss on it. Eventually he slings it back over his shoulder ...”

“... his Miscellaneous Works, including an edited text of the autobiography, by his friend and executor Lord Sheffield. The two latter enterprises bear particularly on the controversy over the 1776 volume, and on questions arising from Gibbon’s (and Sheffield’s) responses to the French Revolution. This is therefore not a study of the Decline and Fall, or ...”

“... in an organic and effortless ebb and flow. This is how he describes the sinister and sadistic Lord Devon when he comes with his henchmen, Mr Benjamin and Mr Poole (‘Their hats were small black dinghies beached upon their wigless heads’), to round up the printers and burn down the printworks: ‘His lordship did not so much as lift an eyebrow. He ...”

“... curtain on the emissaries of the leading nations to the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Britain’s Lord Castlereagh, the future suicide, was remembered at home by Lady Morgan for ‘his cloudless smile ... his untunable voice and passion for singing all the songs in The Beggar’s Opera’. In Vienna he behaved like the Ulster Protestant he was, staying in ...”

“... its Columbus. Within a few decades this continent had been exploded, mostly by its anti-Columbus, James Cook, and crumbled into a multitude of islands in a vast ocean, mapped, measured and ready for invasion by beachcombers, traders, whalers, missionaries, colonial administrators and, in their wake, historians. The voyagers, equipped with scientists and ...”

“... understaffed, the Bari base – under the command, as it happens, of another Communist, Major James Klugman – had to decode and re-encode all traffic between Frank and Cairo in both directions. The matter of the code-books was at last sorted out, just before Frank and Sergeant Scott crossed the frontier into Bulgaria, when they were immediately involved ...”

“... papers’ were transcribed for the prompt book, licensed by the Master of the Revels as the Lord Chamberlain’s deputy, annotated by the prompter, and divided into actors’ parts. Publication, whether in authorised or unauthorised editions, or in the Folio collection of 1623, involved further interference, sometimes by scribes and always by ...”

“... and in France were shared by Paris, Versailles, Lyons, Marseilles and Bordeaux. So, as Henry James explained, ‘one has not the alternative of speaking of London as a whole, for the simple reason that there is no whole of it ... Rather, it is a collection of many wholes, and of which of them is one to speak?’ Which, indeed? One matter which ...”

“... a Second Class, was surely employable? Matthew was bailed out by his father’s Whig connections: Lord Lansdowne took him on as private secretary with minimal responsibilities. He pulled in some £288 a year and an additional £480 from an Oriel fellowship (Oriel had not yet tied its fellowships to Schools, and Oriel was Dr Arnold’s old college) – not bad ...”

“... us. By an accident of the publishing season, Tennant’s morsel of national whimsy coincides with James Michener’s brick-sized The Covenant. At 873 pages (costing a mere £7.95 – compare Alice fell’s 124 for £5.50), this can claim to be the only Great American South African novel. Michener’s work belongs to the currently best-selling genre of the ...”

“... from Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (very clearly a novel about conflict between species) to James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (surely the only novel ever to have been based on a thorough reading of George Gosse’s Omphalos, his totally discredited reconciliation of Darwin and the Book of Genesis). Yet the questions remain, are even stimulated by ...”

“... trial started.) The trial took place at Lancaster Castle in the summer of 1975. Mr Justice (later Lord) Bridge made no secret of his approach to the evidence. ‘I am of the opinion,’ he told the jury, ‘not shared by all my brothers on the bench that, if a judge has formed a clear view, it is much better to let the jury see that and say so and not pretend ...”

“... who likes to be precise about such things, cites 88. Some had fallen on hard times, like Lord Strathspey, 31st chief of the Clan Grant, who was living in reduced circumstances in Putney, but most of the rest kept smart London establishments in Mayfair or Regent’s Park; they simply no longer wanted a country house. Land management was time-consuming ...”