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“... early as 1744, Caroline Lennox had eloped with Henry Fox, later Lord Holland and father of Charles James. It was a sensible move as he was far more exciting than his three future brothers-in-law, one of whom – Mr Conolly as a matter of fact – was so boring that the other two noticed it. There was little scandal; Fox was not a highly unsuitable match, and ...”

“... there was no statutory control over shotguns until 1968). In 1689, the Bill of Rights presented to William and Mary included, among many rights which were old, one which was new: ‘That the Subjects which are Protestants may have Arms for their Defence suitable to their Condition and as allowed by Law.’ This was the model for the American Bill of Rights of ...”

“... Burke’s early opponents, English radicals such as Tom Paine and Mary Shelley’s parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, tried to neutralise the damage his imagery did to the popular side, by giving the monstrous child an even more monstrous parent. If the Revolution was going bad, it was because of the sins of the fathers. Aristocracy became ...”

“... his new knowledge of Nature’s works. We can recover the details from the surrounding darkness. William Sharp, a friend of Hunter, made an engraving from the painting in 1788, soon after it was finished, and there is also a small, fine-enamel-on-copper copy by Henry Bone, made ten years later. From these we can see more clearly not only what Reynolds ...”

“... unable to raise the revenue to pay the crews. After the Restoration in 1660, both Charles II and James II demonstrated enthusiasm and expertise in nurturing naval expansion. But the Royal Navy’s performance in the Second and Third Dutch Wars was uneven, and political and religious divisions among its officers and men enabled ...”

“... Coast and Europe descended on the town of Rawlins, fifty miles north of the Colorado state line. James Craig Watson, the director of the Ann Arbor Observatory, and Simon Newcomb, from the Naval Observatory in Washington, were among those hoping to catch a first definitive glimpse of Vulcan, though others had other purposes: Thomas Edison wanted to test one ...”

“... fairly well-known about Gogarty’s side of a contentious relation with Joyce, Louis Berrone’s James Joyce in Padua (1977) has eked out the little information on Joyce’s time in that city, and C.P. Curran’s papers have annotated the Dublin years. More is now known about Lucia Joyce’s infatuation with Beckett. There are new letters from Ezra Pound and ...”

“... won a new status for authorship, to befit the moral and educative role he claimed for it. Under James I the former bricklayer and soldier and brawler and convict, the one-time mediocre actor and hack adapter of other people’s plays, became the royal laureate, the friend of courtiers, diplomats and MPs, the honorand of universities. He was Britain’s ...”

“... her, it seems, without a biddyish dilation on the carnality of her themes. ‘Maude Hutchins,’ James Kelly wrote in 1955, does ‘as she pleases’ as a novelist and ‘to date what has pleased her most is s-e-x as observed and enjoyed from the feminine vantage point.’ Hutchins, Maxwell Geismar said, was a writer who went about ‘describing casually all ...”

“... the scale of the thing dwarfs every preceding instance. On 20 December the secretary of defence, James Mattis, resigned after Trump tweeted his vow to withdraw from Syria. This led to a reiteration, by policy experts along with many Democrats and almost all the mainstream media, of the moral importance of staying in Syria. Solemn admonitions were combined ...”

“... States. He responded by convening in Whitehall a gathering of ‘eminent authors’, attended by William Archer, J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, A.C. Benson, Hugh Benson, Laurence Binyon, Robert Bridges, Hall Caine, G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Maurice Hewlett, Anthony Hope, W.J. Locke, E.V. Lucas, J.W. Mackail, John ...”

“... idea of literature, and a peculiar division of labour between writer and reader. Their author, William Gaddis, who won the National Book Award with JR, might actually have felt short-changed by the accolade of the imprint, to judge by a riff in JR deploring the way ‘longer works of fiction [are] now dismissed as classics and … largely unread due to the ...”

“... that matter – spotting conspiracies where others see epidemics: no less a man of the people than William Cobbett was adamant that Asiatic cholera itself was a fiction invented by the powers-that-be to hold the masses in terror. Indeed, as Steve Watkins underlines in his book, the Left in many of its moods has traditionally suspected that the medical ...”

“... to be Greekish’. A ‘classical Cockney’ was on a par with a ‘hottentot in jackboots’. William Hamilton brought home the Barbarini Vase in 1783, and running short of cash, sold it to the Duchess of Portland. The renamed Portland Vase began to exist in a host of reproductions, in some of which the nude figures were suitably draped. In her novel The ...”

“... with a warning. For years past, as I drove from King’s Cross to the Angel, I have noticed St James’s Church, Pentonville, at the top of the hill and have promised myself that one day I would pay it a visit. I was in too much of a hurry or the traffic was too dense or it was beginning to rain – there was always some excuse for pushing by. On the one ...”