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“... problem with those who, as the New Statesman soon put it, pictured Brooke as a ‘blend of General Gordon and Lord Tennyson’. To the disgust of Brooke’s Cambridge and Bloomsbury acquaintances, he promoted him as a clean-cut poet-patriot long after the sell-by date for enthusiastic lines about soldiers pouring out ‘the red/Sweet wine of youth’. ...”

“... of having good back-up at home. The wives of the 37 banded together and began to organise, with Mary Mooney as their leader. She and her husband, Mick, live in an ex-council house on the eastern edge of Liverpool, a few minutes’ walk from Kingsheath Avenue. This is where nine-year-old Olivia Pratt-Korbel was shot and killed in August 2022 by a drug ...”

“... charges; he did admire and feel loyalty to Aneurin Bevan, one of the few politicians admitted by Mary to the family home as a friend; above all, he was taking a serious and avoidable risk.This isn’t good biography, good psychohistory, good political analysis or even good journalism (‘equally’, for heavens’ sake). Elsewhere in the book Ziegler makes ...”

“... the new one (Anne Boleyn) decapitated, an indecently hasty third royal marriage, the Princess Mary and her conservative supporters neatly sidestepped. Since the King could not be directly blamed for these upsets, those who disliked them (most people?) pointed the finger at his upstart ministers, and above all at Thomas Cromwell, whose personal role in ...”

“... material, revisits the political thought of the Puritan divine Richard Baxter. It figures in Gordon Schochet’s account of the Restoration bishop Samuel Parker, the enemy of Milton and of Marvell. It figures again in Lawrence Klein’s account of the politics and philosophy of the third Earl of Shaftesbury, the grandson of Locke’s patron, the Whig ...”

“... celebrating the canalisation of eros along those subterranean rivers of sublimation. Thus for Gordon Rattray Taylor sex in history represents ‘the warfare between the dangerous and powerful drives and the systems of taboos and inhibitions which man has erected to control them’, while for Lawrence Stone history is a geology of the glacial grinding of ...”

“... they had grown up with Charlotte and knew the unpleasant secrets of the Mews’ new home at 9 Gordon Street. By 1888 the eldest son, Henry, and the youngest daughter, Freda, were both incurably insane. Both had to be confined, Henry with his own nurse in Peckham Hospital, Freda in the Carisbrooke Mental Home on the Isle of Wight, the town which Charlotte ...”

“... have been partly shaped by his early vulnerability. After one youthful snub, from another cousin, Mary Chaworth, he avoided putting himself again into a position where he needed to trust a woman’s sincerity. (The women in his poems do not establish any hold over the heroes – who are haunted figures, but driven by some internal demon, never by the power of ...”

“... to her ‘proper station’ as an earl’s daughter. A comparison with, say, Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton reveals the slenderness of real social concern in Fanny Burney’s novels. It is only possible to see her as a ‘Jacobin’ by ignoring the evidence of her journals and letters, in which she does indeed show humanitarian concern for individual ...”

“... was delayed until February 1587, perhaps to provide a ceremonial counterpoint to the execution of Mary Queen of Scots. In Elizabethan London far more people went to sermons than to the theatre. Religious literature outweighed secular by a factor of six or seven. The unique English practice of ringing changes on the church bells ‘became part of the fun of ...”

“... even as a route to socialism. His oldest brother, Bernard, became a clergyman; his oldest sister, Mary, served as a missionary in South Africa; and his brother Tom, a fervent admirer of William Morris, joined the Christian Social Union and volunteered in a boys’ home in Hoxton founded by F.D. Maurice, the pioneering Christian socialist. A high-minded ...”

“... judgments of Scottish and English historians, was he ‘two kings or one’? Wormald contrasted Gordon Donaldson’s cool assessment that, as king of Scotland, James was ‘a man of very remarkable political ability and sagacity in deciding on policy and of conspicuous tenacity in having it carried out’ with Lawrence Stone’s shrill insistence that ‘as ...”

“... in command of troops of the London Foot Association, who opened fire on looters taking part in the Gordon Riots. The painting shows him standing at the head of his musket-wielding soldiers, the mob in the foreground passing chairs and swag from the windows above. There’s also the delicate question of William Swiney Turner, Sir Barnard’s son, a clerk in the ...”

“... Aunt Li weeps a great deal but Aunt Annie has a permanent smile and likes to dress up as Queen Mary or a Cossack or a Spanish dancer – embarrassing Norman with this gear when she collects him from school. The grandfather does not talk to Norman but conducts loud, familiar conversations with God. He breeds dangerous gamecocks (frightening to Aunt Li, who ...”

“... Anglo-Saxon and philology. Later a series of women writers and editors – Evelyn Scott, Caroline Gordon, Katherine White, Eve Auchincloss – would offer nurture and support. But Stafford never had much respect for women. The women writers she admired show up in marginal, often diminished ways in the biographies. She named her cat George Eliot, and planted ...”