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“... She was related by marriage to some of Britain’s most influential families, including the (Lord John) Russells and the Trevelyans; her father, Sir Hugh Bell, was also a Liberal MP. She took a brilliant First in history after only five terms at Oxford, despite enjoying an active social life. Her interest in the East began at 25, when she spent six months at ...”

“... a Ring o’ Roses’, Duncan understood that he was ‘it’: ‘the Chosen One … a “King” or victim of the children’s round dance’. From there the scene shifted underground, to a huge cavern where Duncan found himself alone with a stone chair. Again he felt himself picked out as a king, but now fear ...”

“... counsel Vince Foster (who committed suicide in 1993) in order to cover up her transgressions. John Knox was surely right to label his 1558 diatribe against powerful women only The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women, so well developed is the tradition of denigrating women thought to exercise influence from behind the ...”

“... someone really insane to fix the economy’; but by the time he wrote about politics, profiling John McCain for Rolling Stone in 2000, he was basically a liberal Democrat.) His roommate Mark Costello became a lifelong confidant and sometime collaborator. (Costello is now a novelist in New York and teaches law at Fordham University.) Wallace’s depression ...”

“... After the appearance of Poems of Mr John Milton in 1645, Milton published no further works of poetry until Paradise Lost in 1667. During the intervening decades he devoted almost the whole of his literary energies to attacking the Stuart monarchy and defending the creation of the English commonwealth and, later, the Cromwellian Protectorate ...”

“... It made no more sense than it makes for 20th-century New Yorkers to hanker after being ruled by King Arthur and his knights. Stone’s history is a good deal like Mark Twain’s, and hardly the worse for it either. Still, historical, textual, and interpretative questions will creep in. Did Socrates hanker after a return to aristocratic or monarchical ...”

“... Patience is a mark of the classic, according to Frank Kermode. ‘King Lear, underlying a thousand dispositions, subsists in change, prevails, by being patient of interpretation.’ It follows that a work of art is not a classic if it insists, apparently, on being read in one way. By that criterion, Ulysses would appear to be a classic ...”

“... court, parliament and the law, and it is strange to have such cultural nationalism ascribed to a king whose ostensible war-aim was to be king of France. Mr Johnson’s nationalism has other unfortunate results. As befits a historian who began his account of English national identity with the heresy of a Welsh monk, Mr ...”

“... I don’t want to pretend that Machiavelli was actually a classic liberal, a precursor of John Locke, celebrating individual rights, the public/private distinction and the rule of law. The sanguine suggestion that a new ruler might make himself secure in regard to the political class by ‘doing away with them’ is enough to dispel any thought of ...”

“... warning signs were there early on, when Truss announced that she wanted to accompany the new king on his tour of the four nations of the United Kingdom, although she had only been in office for a matter of days. Someone talked her out of that. Instead, she and Kwarteng spent the next ten days planning for a major shift in government policy at a time when ...”

“... of the Middle Ages; or tracing the mounted political figure from Kant’s grumbling about the new King of Prussia arriving in Königsberg in a carriage to the caparisoned horse of President Kennedy’s funeral cortège. Figures from Paul Mellon to Siegfried Kracauer, Robespierre to Claude Simon, whose cavalry unit was massacred in World War Two, put in ...”

“... warlords. At the height of the 17th-century Time of Troubles, the Kremlin was occupied by a Polish king and supported by a predominantly Polish army. (Imagine an Irish king installed in the Tower of London by an Irish-French army, supported by English Catholics and given diplomatic backing by the Vatican; English national ...”

“... Archimedes’ death is the one fixed point in his biography: the 12th-century Byzantine scholar John Tzetzes gives a birth date of 287 BC. That may be correct, and it may also be correct that his father was an astronomer. But everything else is uncertain. We can, however, say something about the world he lived in. Syracuse and Tarentum were among the ...”

“... bought drink for other soldiers. She also paid 20d a day for the training of ‘her’ soldier, John Trahern, who took her place in the Hereford militia. For Jeffreys, the disturbances must at first have seemed remote: London figured primarily in her books as a place of business, and a place to buy whalebone, writing paper and other luxuries. In October ...”

“... especially technical words, regardless of the language. Chaucer, taking over as clerk of the king’s works, was given an inventory of dead stock at the Tower of London that included ‘i ramme cum toto apparatu excepta i drawying corda que frangitur et devastatur, i fryingpanne, i lathe pro officio carpentarii’: a battering-ram with a winding-cord too ...”