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“... veterans of public discussion; others, like William Godwin, Coleridge, Helen Maria Williams and James Montgomery, were just setting out on careers that promised extraordinary achievements. They are unusual suspects because they were not organisers and activists, orators and pamphleteers who urged direct action in support of reform, or who set out to incite ...”

“... 1936, a few days after the German invasion of the Rhineland, Nancy Astor threw a party at 4 St James’s Square. As well as being the first woman MP (elected in 1919), Astor was a legendary hostess. To this particular dinner party she invited various League of Nations delegates, the American and Russian ambassadors, an assortment of English friends and ...”

“... generalisations of post-colonial critique. He presents, among other specimens, an unfamiliar James Anthony Froude, whose fulminations about native degeneration in The English in Ireland contrast sharply with his early appreciation of Isaac Butt’s version of Home Rule in the 1870s. (The polarisations after 1886, when the Gladstonian Liberal embrace of ...”

“... Ned, an American whose voice whines like a gnat, manipulates the stupid but beautiful bisexual James in The Sweet Dove Died. Inviting his rival, the fastidious Leonora, to view the ‘exceptionally wide double bed covered in mauve velvet’ in his flat, he enjoys telling her that ‘comfort isn’t all I go for.’Spinsters, clerics, homosexuals – and ...”

“... like it. ‘I’m just having trouble working out what it is you would like to do,’ said Wendy Lord, head of corporate communications. ‘I want to see what you do at Edmonton.’ ‘But we’re quite an old facility. I could arrange for you to visit one of the newer ones.’ ‘I’d prefer to come to Edmonton,’ I said. ‘Just to see how you’re ...”

“... the publication of his Influence of Sea Power upon History. He was dined by Queen Victoria and the Lord Mayor of London, received by the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister and given honorary degrees by Oxford and Cambridge within the space of a week. The reason? He had written a book which took England as his model, which saw America as ‘civilised’ to ...”

“... what the Conservative Party is for. The pragmatism which Baldwin inherited from the great Lord Salisbury has proved a better guide for most of the ‘Conservative century’. Part of Baldwin’s achievement between the wars was surely to contain the ideologically-driven pressures of faction within his party while opportunistically waiting for the ...”

“... provide Bounty with mezzanine decks; no one at home with British ways of speech could write ‘Lord Cuthbert Collingwood’; and the description of that stout, intrepid botanist Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, as a social dilettante is likely to shake the reader’s confidence in this rambling, sometimes overinstructive, but highly ...”

“... people, who met in pubs, drank draught cider and sometimes read each other their works. It is Lord of the Rings country and yet, interestingly, social nuances appear even in this consciously Christian and nostalgic setting. Tolkien the Catholic could not stand Lewis’s fundamentalist allegory, as exemplified in tales like The Lion, the Witch and the ...”

“... points out that in a letter to Thackeray about his polite rejection of a poem of hers called ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’ as not suited to a family magazine like the Cornhill, Elizabeth discreetly mocked him in words very similar to those used ten years later by Josephine Butler when she led the fight against the Contagious Diseases Act. (Her triumph ensured ...”

“... theatres, parties and country-house weekends. He begins to wonder if he has fallen into a Henry James novel, with Rosemary as the beautiful worldly corrupt European villainness. He turns out indeed to be as spellbound as Chad in The Ambassadors, for when the long-awaited peace-making letter arrives from his wife Roo, he doesn’t answer it. Yet he isn’t ...”

“... the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge shaped the physics of men such as William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and James Clerk Maxwell’. Of course, nobody believes that even Cambridge in the early years of the last century was so inward-looking that the Tripos and Smith’s Prize examinations were the sole influences on ...”

“... tenants, eligible ones complaining that it was too far from London and too obviously sited so that Lord Lytton could drive by with his fashionable guests and point out the evidence of his concern for other writers. There was also the alternative, initiated by the Queen herself, of a nomination to the company of poor brethren at the Charterhouse. Some fifty ...”

“... of mid-life vulnerability and the need to pause, to look back but also ahead – ‘waiting on the Lord’. In the words of James Thurber, ‘all men should strive to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.’ The blessing was more disjointed: alternating English and Hebrew by an Episcopalian and a ...”

“... smallest police station (a plinth in Trafalgar Square), its first Greek Revival building (James Stuart’s Doric temple of 1758 at Hagley Park) and Temple Bar (in its present situation in a Hertfordshire wood) are all follies by Headley’s and Meulencamp’s definition. The first, like many of their eye-catchers and shams, is not quite what it ...”