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“... Professor Elliott has now demonstrated finally that it was helped on by Spanish encouragement. The French cult of une foi, un roi, une loi grew up, not because France was a united country, but because it was not. As French disadvantages emerge from investigation, so some supposed ...”

“... uncannily like a sibling of the much lamented Euston Arch, demolished in 1961. And so it is. Philip Hardwick’s Birmingham Station was designed to be the bookend to his Greek Doric triumphal arch into London’s Euston. Opened in 1838, it’s the oldest monumental railway building in the world, Grade 1 listed. Soon renamed Curzon Street Station, from ...”

“... And hence the phenomenon of the Royal Joke during which people fall about in near-hysteria when Philip or Charles say something like: ‘If it rains today we could all get wet!’ People then queue up to tell the TV camera about ‘the Prince’s wonderful sense of humour’. More lies, always more lies. The cultural compulsion is truly strong. I was once ...”

“... atmosphere of suburban Surrey’ masked dissipation: You can buy an electric razor, or a French dinner, or a well-cut suit. You can dance at the Tower Restaurant on the roof of the Cathay Hotel ... If you want girls, or boys, you can have them, at all prices, in the bath-houses and the brothels. If you want opium you can smoke it in the best ...”

“... across my tired head – lies with those blackberry eyes shut in that sulphurous cavernous face. Philip Bagguley refers to (without quoting) these words more than once, marvelling at their unkindness. Woolf passes from mild contempt to professional interest in the writer’s hidden wound, then comes a chilling dismissal. She won’t think of him ...”

“... died in the ensuing siege, three thousand on the night of 5 September. It was the greatest single French loss of the Second World War.The transatlantic liners that once made Le Havre almost chic have gone, but the sea is still just about the only way to get there from London. On a moonlit winter evening, as the shore approaches, the town lays itself out ...”

“... for his money. By the mid-Forties he was chalking up three bottles of whisky a day, which as Sean French points out would be the financial equivalent of a modern-day cocaine habit. The roaring success of Gaslight helped to fund his addiction, so that the play made him and marred him at a stroke. A postcard to his brother from Ireland meticulously charts his ...”

“... that gave Braudel’s masterpiece, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), its strikingly original structure. Braudel told the history of the Mediterranean in three acts. First came an inquiry into the imperceptibly slow history of geography and climate, which ‘exists almost out of time’. The second took up the ...”

“... Deià in Mallorca. There they had their second child and they asked Robert Graves to name him – Philip. ‘The Relics’, which appeared in Mathews’s first collection, The Ring (1970), is a set of variations on imaginary landscapes in yellow and red, bringing to mind the Phrygian Midas, and a landscape turning to clanking metal, as in Ovid:Where are the ...”

“... in Perspectives more or less verbatim, though slightly abridged – and of course translated into French, which Sam Taylor has then turned into a breezier modern English idiom (‘he fell short of his own standards’) than the translation of the Lives by Julia Conaway Bondanella and Peter Bondanella that I’ve just quoted from. Perspectives (the ...”

“... Still, she loved him,in her own fashion, if often querulously or diluted by suspicion.But her French was perfection, thus bestowing on him a kind of invisibility,his preferred mode. It would remain so and over time only intensifyuntil he came to resemble a decommissioned spy or some Burroughs character,one of his old grey junkies in rumpled gabardine and ...”

“... this state of affairs. Other Marxist historians are taking up the challenge, as the work edited by Philip Corrigan suggests. In the present review I shall concentrate on this aspect of the three books. The books have a lot in common. In their own ways, all bear witness to the immense, inertial substantiality of states. Andcr son has stressed – above all, in ...”

“... philosopher Norman O. Brown, Cage compared writings by Fuller and McLuhan to a recent book by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, most likely The Technological Society. Cage felt that Ellul’s stylish writing had turned the book into a ‘watertight work of art’, but Ellul’s complaint about ‘life under technique’ had clearly got under his ...”

“... present threat to English religion and government. The intelligence agent William Herle wrote that Philip II, the king of Spain, hated English Protestants ‘with an immortal hatred never to be reconciled, esteeming them worse than either Turks, Marranos, Jews, or Infidels, the blasphemers of God’s holy name and of his son Jesus Christ’. Richard ...”

“... fiction, but in several passages Ricks nearly forgets Beckett, and fixes his attention on Philip Larkin, Hardy, Swift, Coleridge, Sydney Smith, Christina Rossetti or another. I can’t believe that he chose to deliver these Clarendon Lectures as a hodge-podge. It is more probable that he observed the impressionism that Beckett ascribed to ...”