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“... heaven, I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me!’; congregations pray, ‘Prevent us, O Lord, in all our doings.’ Once or twice only, he misses what would seem to be an obvious literary reference. For instance, in the entry on wardrobe there is no mention of the passage in Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’ which tells how the body of a murdered ...”

“... The mythology of the Titanic seems to have been pretty cigar-ridden, even before the poem. Lord’s A Night to Remember reveals that the ship’s Captain allowed you in the room only if you were so still that the blue cloud didn’t move (‘firmness and urbanity’). From Ragtime we learn that the ship’s principal owner, J.P. Morgan, was portrayed ...”

“... under Moses.’ It was as a preacher of ‘free grace’ that Clarkson first made his mark. James Nayler, who is sometimes taken as the leader of a ‘Ranting’ tendency in early Quakerism, was equally known as a defender of ‘the universal free grace of God to all mankind’. Davis passes by, with one glancing reference, Christopher Hill’s ...”

“... force, and, as modern translations make clearer (the Revised Standard Version translates the King James Bible’s ‘time should be no longer’ as ‘there should be no more delay’), it is only when the seventh trumpet sounds that ‘the mystery of God’ will be finished. But Kant, encouraged perhaps by Luther’s translation, was unable to wait. In his ...”

“... anything controversial. Rousseau’s case was promoted by the governor of the principality: Lord Keith, a Jacobite exile and friend of David Hume and James Boswell. Rousseau could hardly have been more fortunate in his protector. For Keith was no longer a fiery Catholic enthusiast for lost causes but a good-natured ...”

“... between social standing and technical skill, the gentlemen and the tarpaulins, in which even Lord Howard could lay a gun, and spoke freely and by name to his ‘poor toiling and continual labouring mariner[s]’; while Drake, in a famous scene which Rodger does his best to run down, not only said, ‘I must have the gentleman to haul and draw with the ...”

“... irregular vigour of Jacobin enthusiasm suffering strange emasculation under the hands of a finical lord-chamberlain’. This would become the tone of the second generation of Romantics towards the most despised of their precursors. For Wordsworth, injured love and a sad rebuke for the loss of self-trust; for Coleridge, wonder at what might have been and pity ...”

“... traffic, occasionally lost, and at the end of ‘Fastest on Earth’ she gets a parking fine in St James’s Square. Many of the pleasures are urban and precisely located in the area around Macaulay’s Bloomsbury flat off Chancery Lane, but there are rural pleasures too. In ‘Easter in the Woods’ she contemplates a finely detailed landscape as she lingers ...”

“... or Isidore (‘gift of Isis’), but over time the proportion of ‘Christian names’ like John, James and Peter for men, or Mary, Catherine and Margaret for women, steadily grew. It never became mandatory to have a saint’s name, though by the 15th century an Italian bishop could inveigh against the choice of ‘pagan’ names like Lancelot. The diffusion ...”

“... boys and girls. A year after he admired Mingo’s dancing, Pepys noted in passing that his patron, Lord Sandwich, had acquired ‘a little Turk and a negroe’, who were to be made to work as pages for the earl’s daughters.English involvement in transatlantic slaving expanded significantly during the 1660s, under the enthusiastic leadership of the new ...”

“... candidate for measurement) Fothergill says, ‘I think you must be Mr J.M. Barrie,’ to which Sir James, ‘slyly’, says: ‘You are not far wrong.’ Harold Acton, with his ‘Big Ben’ voice, presides at the last dinner of Oxford’s banned Hypocrites’ Club, which ends in much goat-like leaping about, the sort of conduct which would not have been ...”

“... is that he seems barely to adjudicate significance; he’s like a child who has taken Henry James’s injunction to novelists – ‘be one of the people on whom nothing is lost’ – literally; he appears to just write down everything he can recall (and he appears to recall everything). It’s easy to marshal examples of what makes My Struggle ...”

“... his first serious income as an artist came from the stained glass windows he began to design for James Powell and Sons in the late 1850s. He turned out hundreds of such designs over the course of his working life, most of them for Morris & Co. In a frenzy of mourning after Morris’s death in 1896, he ‘flew at his work’ – the phrase is Georgiana’s ...”

“... by the standards of the day – was an international success, and was praised by Proust, Joyce and James; but his poetry was not much read, and he himself (or his reputation) not much liked. In France, where he lived from 1910 to 1915, he was seen as a phoney and a sponger. ‘He is a child,’ the novelist René Boylesve said; ‘he gives himself away with a ...”

“... behind the lectures was the advocate Henry Home (soon to be elevated to the judicial bench as Lord Kames), a sharp reminder, not least to Smith’s modern-day devotees, of the significant role played by patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment. Indeed, nepotism thrived in the academic dynasties of Scotland’s university towns. Not that merit was ...”